Thucydides is generally not considered a philosopher in the sense that Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle are. David Bolotin, for instance, said, “[Thucydides] is not generally thought of as a political philosopher.”[1] Yet his only work, The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians,[2] is the densest and most profound work that deals with philosophy from antiquity. If political philosophy concerns itself with the nature of the human city, as Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics do, then Thucydides’ work stands alongside those canonical classics as a volume concerned with the question of the human city and is therefore a work of political philosophy.

Classical political philosophy presupposes nature. This is what demarcates it from modern political philosophy, or science, which ultimately rejects the notion of an established nature which necessarily erodes political philosophy into malleable political ideology.[3] Insofar that classical political philosophy presupposes nature, classical political philosophy also dichotomizes itself between the holy city and the naturalistic city;[4] that is, to borrow a division given to posterity by St. Augustine, the city of God and the city of man. What role do the gods play in the origins and development of the city, and what role does human will, geography, and cunning play in the origins and development of the city?

In the confines of classical political philosophy Thucydides seems modern because he rejects the holy city and concentrates solely on the naturalistic city. Insofar that Thucydides’ city is premised on a naturalistic sine qua non he is perceived as objective and scientific by modern readers who share his metaphysical axiom which presupposes naturalism. Insofar that Thucydides’ city is premised on a foundational nature which explains things, a nature that is established and knowable, he is thoroughly ancient rather than modern. For Thucydides, human nature is real,[5] and the things that make up the natural world have knowable natures—thus permitting Thucydides to examine the question of the law of nature and our relationship to it. In doing so, Thucydides rightly states that his work “was done to last forever,” or, more precisely, will be heard forever.[6]

To understand Thucydides’ law of nature one must carefully examine the many speeches contained in his work; for it is through the speeches that Thucydides examines the question of nature and the human city. What moderns interpret as the objective wie es eigentlich gewesen is, in actuality, the particular project of a particular man: Thucydides. As Leo Strauss said, “[E]very political speech serves a political purpose.”[7] Some historians have recently acknowledged Thucydides as a partisan revisionist of sorts. Donald Kagan, for instance, has written about Thucydides as a revisionist historian responding to popular criticism and opinion on the issue of the Peloponnesian War.[8]

But Thucydides is doing more than responding to the critiques and concerns of his fellow Athenians. He is engaged in a systematic attempt at understanding the working of politics and war through the acceptance of the axiom sine qua non which compelled the war between Athens and Sparta and why the various powers acted the way they did, thereby carving out a space for human agency, cunning, and intelligence in the outcome of events and not presenting mankind as mere puppets of the gods. It is now well-documented that Thucydides’ work is unified by the theme of  justice and compulsion, of right and necessity,[9] but it is also the case – to my mind – that the question of nature, more specifically the law of nature, is the more immediate unifying theme of the work to which the themes of justice and compulsion are contingent.

De Rerum Natura

I have proposed that Thucydides is a political thinker centrally concerned with the question of the working of politics through a law of nature which compels cities to act in a manner befitting of their nature. This presupposes that all cities are not the same and that different cities will have different “constitutions,” so to speak, to follow. More than any written code of law the more natural code of law inscribed into the city rests on its geographic situatedness determining its geopolitical nature. This is revealed in the first major speech written by Thucydides, the speech debate between the Corcyraeans and Corinthians before the Athenians.

The speeches by the Corcyraean and Corinthian representatives before the Athenians is the first dialogue contained in the work. The speech follows the Corinthian defeat at Epidamnus. Epidamnus, as Thucydides informs us, “is right of the approach to the Ionic Gulf.”[10] Epidamnus is a maritime city and the colony of a colony—Corcyra. The incident that supposedly sparked the war was the democratic overthrow of the oligarchic ruling class which fled in exile to the mother colony, Corcyra, and petitioned for redress and restoration. Corcyra complied. The new democratic regime of Epidamnus appealed to Corinth, itself the mother city of Corcyra which was originally established a Corinthian colony, for help and Corinth complied. Here we see that political constitutions bared no marker on Epidamnus—Athens was the most radical democratic polity at the time but they did not ask Athens for any help.

What began as a minor political incident soon boiled over to give way to the deadliest war in ancient Greek history. Corcyra achieved a major victory which granted Corcyra “complete control of the seas in her own area.”[11] This is no little fact to overlook since the question of maritime prowess and situatedness will become a major issue raised by the Corcyraean representatives when petitioning for an alliance with Athens. While not yet disclosed to the reader by Thucydides when the Corcyraean representatives ask for Athenian help, Corcyra’s location as a port city with open access to Sicily undoubtedly played a factor in the Athenian decision to ally with Corcyra. For Thucydides does later reveal that the imperialist ambition of Athens dreamt of a maritime imperium from the coasts of Ionia, down to Libya, and west to Sicily and beyond; Pericles himself states, “The whole world before our eyes can be divided into two parts, the land and the sea, each of which is valuable and useful to man. Of the whole of one of these parts you are in control – not only of the area at present in your power, but elsewhere too, if you want to go further. With your navy as it is today there is no power on earth . . . which can stop you from sailing where you wish.”[12]

Athens was the predominant maritime polis among the Greek city-states prior to the war. Sparta, by geographic contrast, was the predominant continent (or land) polis among the Greek city-states and remained the most powerful military force in Greece when the war erupted. In fact, Athens’ early success against Sparta shocked much of Greece which expected the Spartan-led alliance to easily defeat the more energetic but militarily weaker city. What is also noticeable about the contrasting alliances led by Athens and Sparta is that the Athenian-led Delian League was comprised of most of the seafaring cities of Hellas while the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League, with a few exceptions, was comprised mostly of the land-based cities of Hellas.

This maritime-continental division recapitulates itself through the speeches of the various actors, named and unnamed, throughout the work. In conjunction with the speeches, there is often talk of physis, of nature, the law of nature or “enemies by nature.” Athens’ control of the sea was something the city used for its economic and political advantages. Through her navy Athens controlled the corn and grain routes out of the Black Sea. Through her navy, which was the primary arm of her power, Athens enforced the supremacy of Athenian coinage throughout her empire—forcing even her allies to adopt her monetary system. Her allies were also required to participate in Athenian festivals.

Sparta may have been the most powerful military force in ancient Greece, and although the Athenians were undeniably engaged in an imperial project, this does not mean Sparta was not without her share of questionable actions. All male citizens were rigorously trained in martial arts without exception. Athens, by contrast, relied on a citizen-army to be called up in times of crisis; the Athenian military was not premised on forced militarization. Sparta maintained an oligarchic rule on agrarian slavery, something largely foreign to the commercial-oriented city-state of Athens and her allies. The Spartan army necessarily served as the police force to keep the large population of slaves (which surpassed the native Spartan population) servile and subservient. During the course of the war the slave population swelled as Spartan took slaves from the captured enemy. The structures of the Spartan regime were premised on the maintenance of the oligarchic ruling class and its subordinate military institutions premised on Sparta’s land-based agrarian constitutional nature.

The Speech of the Corcyraeans and Corinthians

The speech of the Corcyraean representatives focuses on the futility of their earlier isolationism and their status as a sea power. This is interesting because the manner by which the Corcyraeans try to persuade the Athenians for help is by striking at what was the heart of Athenian exceptionalism—her cunning, intelligence, and ingenuity. When the Athenian representatives debate the Spartans over the declaration of war, and when Pericles eulogizes the Athenian dead in his magnanimous Funeral Oration, it is Athenian cunning and intelligence that is extolled, subtly and overtly, in both speeches. The Corcyraeans, aware of the exceptionalist psychology of Athens, present themselves as being imitators of the Athenian psyche insofar that they recognize and openly admit of the futility of their earlier isolationism. Only an intelligence people could realize their wrongheadedness and adopt innovative and new policies to counteract it, “We used to think that our neutrality was a wise thing, since it prevented us being dragged into danger by other people’s policies; now we see it clearly as a lack of foresight and as a source of weakness.”[13]

That the Corcyraeans begin by acknowledging their lack of foresight, they thereby paradoxically inform the Athenians that they are, in fact, a cunning and ingenious people who are ready to embrace adventure and innovation. After appealing to Athens that they would also be acting justly, because the Corcyraeans are the “victims of aggression,”[14] they subsequently pivot to the geopolitical reality which has moved them to seek their alliance with Athens. “[W]e are, after you,” the representatives state, “the greatest naval power in Hellas. You would have paid a lot of money and still have been very grateful to have us on your side. Is it not, then, an extraordinary stroke of good luck for you to have us coming over voluntarily into your camp, giving ourselves up to you without involving you in any dangers or any expenses?”[15] Near the end of their appeal, the Corcyraeans bluntly state the most significant geopolitical reason why the Athenians should help them, “Apart from all other advantages, Corcyra lies in an excellent position on the coastal route to Italy and Sicily, and is thus able to prevent naval reinforcements coming to the Peloponnese from there, or going from the Peloponnese to those countries.”[16]

The speech of the Corcyraeans follows a process of development reaching geopolitical revelation. It begins by acknowledging the futility of isolationism as a maritime power. Maritime powers are naturally internationalist; thus Corcyra is finally embracing its geographic constitutional nature by aligning with Athens. This alliance with Athens is beneficial to the Athenians precisely because Athens is the predominant maritime civilization in Hellas. In acknowledging the futility of their previous isolationism the Corcyraeans present themselves as imitators of Athenian intelligence and cunning. They are able to recognize their faults and change accordingly. Their ambition also makes them natural allies for the Athenians who value cunning and intelligence above all other things in men.

After acknowledging the wrongheadedness of their earlier policies, which esoterically presents themselves as being humans akin to the Athenians, the Corcyraeans then shift to explaining why the maritime reality of their city has led them to embrace internationalism and seek an alliance with the Athenians. It is only natural, once one discovers their nature, to embrace and embody it. Therefore, it is only natural that the Corcyraeans align themselves with the master maritime imperium having discovered their physis.

Physis, in Greek, is not something static. Physis entails growth and maturation. Nature is something one grows into and must eventually embody. Failure to grow and embody one’s nature has disastrous consequences. In the conflict with the Corinthians the Corcyraeans have discovered their nature and discovered who is the god of this particular geographic nature: Athens. Thus they invoke Athens’ maritime nature in their appeal for aid like a devotee would his god. It is noteworthy that the practical and pragmatic reasons for an alliance is what the Corcyraeans also drive home with. While stating that they are victims of aggression and that Athens would be acting justly in aiding a victimized power, along with advancing the cause of liberty by liberating Corcyra from the tyranny of Corinth, the bulk of the speech rests on the maritime advantages that Athens would gain if coming to Corcyra’s aid.

When the Corinthians rebut the Corcyraean argument, the Corinthians rest their argument not on any geopolitical nature but on justice and wisdom. The Corinthians also assail the character of the Corcyraeans as deceitful and untrustworthy, “Though they are colonists are ours, they have never been loyal to us and are now at war with us.”[17] This, the Corinthians argue, is the main manner by which they mask their wrongdoings and selfish pursuits. The Corinthians end their speech by simply appealing to common justice, honor, and nobility—the Athenians can be on the side of justice, honor, and nobility by not aligning with the devious, deceitful, and rebellious Corcyraeans. The Corinthians even say, “Do not be influenced by the fact that they are offering you a great naval alliance.”[18]

In between the lines there is a commentary over the distinction between nature and convention. The Corcyraeans make their appeal to nature. Nature is, as Thucydides reveals in his discussion on the civil war in Corcyra and the Melian dialogue, that which is in one’s self-interest. This self-interested nature is, of course, rooted in a geographic reality. The Corinthians appeal to the conventions of justice, honor, and nobility and end by arguing against geopolitical realism. “The right course, surely, is either for you to preserve a strict neutrality or else to join us against them.”[19] According to the Corinthians, the legal course of action is that the mother nation has ruleship over their colonies and that colonies ought to be loyal to their mother nations. This is the precedent of legal right. If the Athenians ally with the Corcyraeans they would be putting themselves against the side of legal right. Furthermore, in such an action the naked self-interest of Athens would be revealed for the whole of the Greek world to see. To help the Corcyraeans, the Corinthians state, would be to “aid and abet them in their crimes.”[20]

But what determines criminality? Legal right and precedent determine criminality. The Corinthian argument is premised on the concept of legal right determined by conventional law and common precedent. Law maintains that a colony is the possession of the mother nation and that the colony should be subservient to the laws and customs of the mother nation. Insofar that Corcyra has always been disloyal and promulgating its own judicial system to serve their interest and subvert Corinthian oversight,[21] the Corcyraeans have long been engaged in criminal activity by the legal precedent of custom and using their “geographical situation” to their own self-advantage.[22] For the Athenians to help the Corcyraeans would mean that the Athenians have no concern for legal right and precedent and be swayed entirely by the law of nature which is self-interest dictated by geographic reality. That is precisely the argument made by the Corcyraeans while veiled with the beautiful but deceitful language of liberty and victimization which the Corinthians show great insight in recognizing and rebutting in their speech.

The law of nature, not the law of legal convention, triumphed in Athens’ decision to ally with Corcyra. As the war between Corcyra and Corinth raged, the Athenians sent a small detachment of ships led by Lacedaimonius to aid the Corcyraeans. The ships participated in the Battle of Sybota where both sides claimed victory. Yet it was the Athenian arrival that prevented the destruction of the Corcyraean navy and thus allowing Corcyra to recover from what would have otherwise been a disastrous defeat. This intervention by Athens which saved Corcyra from destruction thus giving Corinth the legal right to declare war on Athens which would eventually drag Sparta into the war and give birth to the war of “great movement.”

Maritime Realities and Athenian Exceptionalism

The speeches between the Athenian and Spartan representatives over the declaration of war between the two great Hellenic powers in the middle of the first book is the most nakedly exceptional of the Athenians speeches. The speech borders on excessive pride and hubris but also contains some of the most remarkable language in the text. It is during the speech that the psychology of Athenian exceptionalism is fully manifested. Yet a closer inspection of the exceptionalism contained in the speech reveals an undeniable maritime basis for it.

We have already established the geopolitical and geographic realities of nature in Thucydides as a leading factor for the imperial thesis of Athens. The world, according to Pericles, can be divided into land and sea, both of which have their usefulness to man. But it is the sea which Athens dominates which permits her navy unrestricted access to the seas. The Athenians can go wherever they want to go because of this mastery of the sea. The speech by the Athenians at Sparta, giving an apologia for the Athenian Empire, rests on the maritime reality of Athens and, it seems, the superiority of sea to land and what the sea brings to the usefulness and progressive development of man.

When the Athenian representatives give a defense of their empire before the Spartans, they openly acknowledge the reality of the sea as essential to her greatness:

“This is our record. At Marathon we stood out against the Persians and faced them single-handed. In the later invasion, when we were unable to meet the enemy on land, we and all our people took to our ships, and joined in the battle at Salamis. It was this battle that prevented the Persians from sailing against the Peloponnese and destroying the cities one by one; for no system of mutual defense could have been organized in face of the Persian superiority. The best proof of this is in the conduct of the Persians themselves. Once they had lost the battle at sea they realized that their force was crippled and they immediately withdrew most of their army. That, then was the result, and it proved that the fate of Hellas depended on her navy. Now, we contributed to this result in three important ways: we produced most of the ships, we provided the most intelligent of the generals, and we displayed the most unflinching courage. Out of the 400 ships, nearly two-thirds were ours: the commander was Themistocles, who was mainly responsible for the battle being fought in the straights, and this, obviously, was what saved us. You yourselves in fact, because of this, treated him with more distinction than you have treated any visitor from abroad.”[23]

In this remarkable passage in which the Athenians defend themselves and their empire against the Spartans, the speech is not only filled with praise of Athens but also an implicit belittlement of Sparta and, by contingency, the usefulness of land. While it is true that all historians agree that the Battle of Salamis was far more important than the Battle of Thermopylae the Athenians lose no chance in making sure that this reality is a sticking point—a sort of dagger into the side of Sparta—during the opening debate. We also see from this passage the superiority of the sea to the land (at least in the psychology of the Athenians). It was the Battle of Salamis, not any of the land battles, which proved to be the decisive engagement against the Persians. As the Athenians say, Greek liberty “depended on her navy.” Moreover, the Athenians do not hesitate in promoting the fact that they contributed the most to the most important battle. As the representatives say, “[W]e produced most of the ships, we provided the most intelligent of generals, and we displayed the most unflinching courage.” It was, above all, the cunning and intelligence of Themistocles, which won the battle and saved Greece from eastern despotism. As such, Themistocles, as the representatives remind the Spartans, was treated as a greater hero than any Spartan for his role in the defeat of the Persians and the salvation of the Greek people.

The Athenian Empire, thus, was born from a defensive war won at sea. “We did not gain this empire by force. It came to us at a time when you were unwilling to fight on to the end against the Persians. At this time our allies came to us of their own accord and begged us to lead them.” In this striking passage, immediately following the hubristic opening of the Athenian apologia, the representatives from Athens highlight the exceptionalism of their empire. Their empire is, literally, the exception of all history. “We did not gain this empire by force.” Instead, the Athenian Empire was consummated through a defensive act. The other Greek city-states threatened by Persian tyranny “begged” Athens to lead the fight for liberty. Athens was, in this way, compelled by her nature as a maritime polis to contribute the greatest amount to the war against Persia and thus contributed the most to the salvation of Greece from the hands of the conquering and warmongering Persians. The Persian Empire, as the speech entails and as Greek memory would have testified, was won by force of conquest. This is not the case with the Athenian Empire. The Athenian Empire was won by the defense of her fellow brethren who also requested that Athens lead them in the fight against Persia. The Athenian Empire, then, was not the product of naked aggression but benevolence defense.

The benevolence of the Athenian Empire is the subsequent pivot of the speech. It is easy to condemn the hubris of the Athenians and their psychology of imperialism, but in a dark world governed by barbarism and despotism, the imperial democracy of Athens was truly unique in the world.[24] The Athenians say, “No one bothers to inquire why this reproach is made against other imperial Powers, who treat their subjects much more harshly than we do: the fact being, of course, that where force can be used there is no need to bring law. Our subjects, on the other hand, are used to being treated as equals.”[25] Here the Athenians maintain that their empire is just. It was product of a just outcome in a war against aggressive tyranny and the voluntary appeal of the many Greek city-states for Athens to lead them in the struggle against Persia. Furthermore, after the consummation of this empire by defense, the Athenians treat their subject cities with equality. They do not engage in forced submission and impose, by violence, order over the people. Instead, the legal customs of the many cities now under the Athenian imperium remain, and Athens acts as a sort of benevolent guarantor of defense and of long-established customs threatened by foreign forces which lurk just over the horizon of many of her allies. Paradoxically, by embracing nature Athens has become the guardian of cherished customs and conventions throughout the Greek world. Athens, then, understood itself as the guardian of a new quasi-Panhellenic order and of the traditions of the Greek people.

Not only was the Athenian Empire acquired justly, and acts justly, the Athenian Empire is freer than the prospects of a Spartan imperium over Hellas. The Athenians close their speech by saying, “Your own regulated ways of life do not mix well with the ways of others. Also it is a fact that when one of you goes abroad he follows neither his own rules nor those of the rest of Hellas.”[26] Pericles’ Funeral Oration testifies to the public-private distinction critical to the flourishing of liberty. What people do in their private lives is of little importance to the Athenian state assuming they abide by the public orthodoxy which protects the city and fosters the open way of life offered in Athens. This is contrasted with the militaristic and regulatory life of the Spartans. The Athenians end their apologia by implying that not only is their empire just, it is also freer than the Spartan oligarchy with its insistence on militarism and regulative modes of living. This is further revealed as a point of contrast and contention when Pericles declares, “The Spartans, from their earliest boyhood, are submitted to the most laborious training in courage; we pass our lives without all these restrictions, and yet are just as ready to face the same dangers as they are.”[27] There is no benefit for the regulative way of life imposed over all in Sparta.

The exceptionalism of Athens, which is the content of this apologia as Athens and Sparta move closer to war, is premised on the maritime reality of the city and the superiority of sea to land—which is more fully revealed in Pericles’ Funeral Oration and his policy advocacy recounted in the second book. Therefore, there is an undeniable geopolitical dimension to the speech that cannot be missed or overlooked.

As hitherto stated, the Athenians state that it was the Battle of Salamis which proved essential in the salvation of Greece from Persian tyranny. This implicitly establishes the geographic hierarchy of superiority in which the sea is more useful to man than the land. This is borne out by the fact that Athens is not sustained by an elaborate totalitarian agrarian economy built on slavery but is otherwise sustained by having her ports “open to the world”[28] which leads to “all the good things from all over the world [to] flow in to us.”[29] Athenian democracy is also a byproduct of this commercial openness to the world. In fact, the economics of Athenian democracy is built on the fact that power is diffused and contested between the multiple factions that have arisen from this imperium.

Karl August Wittfogel has shown how irrigated agrarian societies develop the most totalitarian of political systems.[30] Because a society is built on a single economic mode of production, this single economic mode of production stratifies itself and leads to the creation of an extensive managerial bureaucratic system which forces mass labor for the sustenance of society. This was the case with Sparta. As an agrarian-based society with little commerce and trade, the Spartan mode of production and society could only be sustained by mass labor and a regulative system of life. This resulted in the extensive Helot slave system which, according to Herodotus, constituted over eighty percent of the nominal Spartan population.[31] The regulative tyranny of Sparta was the product of the geographic law of the land.[32]

Thus, the maritime reality of Athens fostered competition between the ascendant commercial and trading class with the agrarian class and the established oligarchic ruling class. This triangular competition fostered greater openness, compromise, and democratization (i.e. expanding political participation to what the Romans would have called the homines novi) to the Athenian population. The freedom enjoyed by Athens and her allies, almost all of whom were maritime polities, was the product of their geographic nature. The freer polis of Athens, in contrast to the more respective polis of Sparta, did not mean that Athens did not have a stratified society; it simply meant that Athens had more diversity to it than Sparta and less rigidity in those stratas than the singular dominant and rigid oligarchic strata foundational to Sparta. As such, Athenian democracy was the product of economic diversity and class competition which was spurred by open maritime and commercial policies. In Athens, people were not locked into a specified social condition as in Sparta. Rather, there existed the possibility of social mobility and changes in which class held political power in Athens. Such possibility ensured its democracy.

The City Open to the World

Of all the speeches in The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, Pericles’ Funeral Oration may be the most memorable. What makes Pericles’ speech so remarkable and stirring is its praise of the conventions and customs of Athens. The nobility of Athens is not, at least as first appearing from Pericles’ speech, a product of her nature. Instead, Periclean Athens is beautiful because of the customs, laws, and way of life described by Athens is beautiful. (And perhaps strikingly similar to our own.)

Pericles’ speech is stirring because, as mentioned, the reader or listener finds the conventions praised in the speech beautiful and noble. The commitment to law and justice, even unto the foreigner who is not expelled out of whim, strikes us as humane and humanistic. Pericles’ statement of Athens not copying the constitutions and institutions of others, and not relaying on a conscripted military to protect itself, is equally uplifting and exceptional. Pericles’ statement that the shame of poverty is not poverty itself but in not taking the political action to combat it is exceedingly accommodatable to modern welfare thinking. The distinction between public and private lives is also something modern Westerns find attractive in Pericles’ speech.

I am not here to discuss the merits of the exceptionalism contained in Pericles’ speech. But deep within his speech is a geopolitical element that is often missed behind the beauty and grandeur of Pericles’ rhetoric. The beauty and grandeur of Periclean Athens is, in large part, the product of Athens being the “city…open to the world” from which “good things from all over the world flow in to us.” These are not realities that have arisen through the dictates of conventions but from the necessity of geographic demands. When Pericles praises Athenian courage he acknowledges the imperial thesis of Athens when he says that “we launch attack[s] abroad.”[33] Pericles also praises the Athenian navy as the backbone of her strength – even when defeated in battle, often on land, the Athenians have yet revealed their total power because she still retains her navy.[34] That there are memorials to Athenians all over the world, commemorating both good and bad deeds and outcomes, one must ask how these memorials have been erected so far from Athens? The answer, of course, is in the fact that Athens possesses an empire maintained by her navy and control over international trade; thus, “good things from all over the world flow in to us.”

Athens is the city open to the world because Athens is geographically situated to be a city open to the world. Unlike the continental constitution of Sparta, which restricts Sparta to be a land-based entity, the maritime constitution of Athens permits her the possibility to “sail where [we] wish.”[35]

Upon closer inspection of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, there are two cities being spoken of by Pericles. The first, and most memorable and stirring, is the Athens of nomos. The second, and always forgotten, is the Athens of physis. As Pericles’ policies are later revealed by Thucydides, this dialectical tension between the Athens of law and the Athens of her geographic nature comes to the fore.

The Athens of grandeur, of daring intelligence and cunning, and of exceptional bravery – all things Pericles eulogizes and the Athenian representatives at Sparta also praised – is brought to fruition not by the customs of Athens but by the demands imposed on her by her imperial reality. The Athenians must be brave and cunning, like Themistocles, in order to rule the sea and sail wherever they wish. The Athenians must be good with others, and maintain positive relations with other cities, in order to engage in international trade which brings the best goods from around the world back to the Athenian market. This city “open to the world” necessarily comes into conflict with other sea powers that stand athwart its rule. Thus the geographic demands of Athens as a sea power leads us to the most famous dialogue contained in Thucydides’ grand investigation into the nature of politics.

The Melian Dialogue as Geopolitical Determinism

If Pericles’ Funeral Oration is the most eloquent speech in the work, and the most famous political speech in Western history, then the Melian Dialogue is the most notorious speech uttered from the mouth of Athenians and remains the most notorious dialogue in the work and among the most notorious in Western history. The Melian Dialogue is notorious for all the reasons most people already know: The Athenians demand the subjugation of Melos and premise their argument as the rule of the strong over the weak. The Melians, naïve or idealistic, refuse; their refusal prompting Athens to lay siege to their city which results in its extirpation. The Athens of our imagination, the Athens of Pericles, is shown here to be a naked brute which is why it is so shocking and notorious. The Athens we romanticize is far beneath the glorious and enlightened civilization of our imagination.

The Melian Dialogue recapitulates themes that we already discussed in the first book (especially as contained in the debate between the Corinthians and Corcyraeans). Thucydides informs us that “[t]he Melians are a colony from Sparta.”[36] Like the Corcyraeans, the Melians are a colony polity of a superior power. Like the Corcyraeans, the Melians are also a naval power which is something that separates them from their land-based masters. The Melians have, thus far through the war, showed great disloyalty to their mother city by remaining neutral—as a maritime polity, their neutrality is tantamount to isolationism which the Melian representatives stubbornly cling to (unlike the Corcyraeans).

Since Thucydides’ work is a work of instruction, the debate of the Corcyraeans and Corinthians with the debate between the Athenian and Melian representatives is an instructive study in contrasts. The Corcyraeans, as we know, opted to submit to Athenian power and become part of the Athenian Empire and alliance. The Melians, as we know, opted to resist Athenian power and were subsequently destroyed as a result. The Corcyraeans and Melians are both maritime polities who are colonies to larger political forces. The Corycraeans and Melians both engaged in a foreign policy of isolationism and neutrality. Why, then, do the Corcyraeans take a different path than the Melians? Melos is an identical city to Corcyra but the two cities traverse two different paths that results in two different outcomes.

The recapitulation of earlier themes is also seen through the beginning of the dialogue when the Athenians restate their defensive imperial exceptionalism. The Athenians begin their dialogue with the Melians by briefly mentioning their actions against Persia. However, they speak more strongly in their defense by employing false premises.

The Athenian representatives claim they will not claim a noble justification for their empire by recoursing to their actions against Persia. Thucydides uses the word kalon,[37] which Rex Warner translated as “fine.” Kalon, of course, is a word that Aristotle frequently uses for noble beauty. By claiming they will not recourse to the beautiful nobility of their prior actions, yet doing so in the same sentence, the hypocrisies of power are instantly revealed at the beginning of the dialogue. There is something sinister about the Athenian representatives which was absent in their otherwise hubristic but magnificent speech in defense of their empire before the Spartans. By claiming that they will not recourse to their beautifully noble action in defense of Greece against Persia, though implicitly having just done so, the Athenians begin with an aura of superiority.

It is during the dialogue between the two sides that the discussion over the “law of nature” finally materializes. The Athenians open by saying “our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can. This is not a law that we made ourselves, nor were we the first to act upon it when it was made . . . We are merely acting in accordance with it, and we know that you or anybody else with the same power as ours would be acting in precisely the same way.”[38] In this telling revelation the Athenians articulate the view that Thrasymachus (re)states in Plato’s Republic. Nature is the rule of the strong over the weak. The Athenians subsequently prevent any further discussion over this point by claiming that if the Melians were powerful they would be acting in the same manner that the Athenians are currently acting in.

This causes the Melians to retort by claiming that the law of nature, which is the law of self-interest, will lead Sparta not to betray the fact that the Melians are their colonists and brethren. The Melians put their trust in others rather than themselves for their salvation. The Athenians counter that the law of nature, of self-interest, is “to be safe.” They then assail the Spartans as not being adventurous and that because they lack an adventurous spirit they will not come to the aid of Melos. The Athenians implicitly argue that if the Melians were to follow their self-interest, the law of nature, then they would join Athens rather than remain an enemy.

Returning to an earlier portion of the dialogue, it is clear that the Athenians are not as nakedly brutal as it initially appears.[39] The Athenians give the Melians an opportunity to “save [themselves]”[40] by joining them. The Athenians also state that Melian acceptance of the Athenian alliance would be mutually beneficial. It is the lack of intelligence, or obstinance, exuded by the Melians which quickly becomes a problem. The Melians think that the policy of neutrality allows them to be friends of both sides. The Athenians, however, remind the Melians “[w]e rule the sea and you are islanders, and weaker islanders too than the others; it is therefore particularly important that you should not escape.”

The Melians are islanders. The Melians are a maritime polity. The Melians are a sea-power just like how the Athenians are a sea power whose navy can travel anywhere they please. By being a sea-power the Melians are naturally, that is, geopolitically, under the orbit of Athens rather than Sparta. This is what the Corcyraeans recognized but the Melians did not. The Athenians inform the Melians that precisely because they are a maritime polity they cannot permit the Melians to remain outside of their imperial orbit. To do so would be make Athens look weak. And appearing weak is something Athens cannot afford in this war against Sparta. “As a matter of fact,” the Athenians say, “we are not so much frightened of states on the continent. They have their liberty, and this means that it will be a long time before they begin to take precautions against us. We are more concerned about islanders like yourselves, who are still unsubdued, or subjects who have already become embittered by the constraint which our empire imposes on them.”[41]

Before the Athenians state the obvious about the law of nature being the rule of the powerful over the weak, they offer an opportunity to the Melians to grow into their nature by recognizing themselves as “islanders” who are naturally under the orbit of Athens. To do so would permit their retention of customs and conventions while supporting Athens in the war. Moreover, Athens will remain strong and in control of the seas and Melos will benefit, politically, militarily, and economically, from their alliance with Athens. The Athenians even implore them, “Do not let this happen to you, you who are weak and whose fate depends on a single movement of the scale. And do not be like those people who, as so commonly happens, miss the chance of saving themselves in a human and practical way.”[42] The Athenians constantly give the Melians every opportunity to recognize the reality of the situation that they find themselves and to truly embrace the law of nature and their self-interest which ought to necessitate the Melians to accept Athenian overrule.

Contained in the Melian Dialogue is an elaborate discussion on geopolitical determinism. First, the Athenians “rule the sea.” Second, the Melians are “islanders.” Third, the law of nature, which manifests itself in strength, is founded on self-interest. Fourth, it is in the self-interest of Melos—as a maritime polity—to accept Athenian rule which will save them from destruction and bring many benefits to their populace hitherto unexperienced from their prior policy of isolation because the law of nature necessitates the self-interest of Athens to make sure all island polities are under their geopolitical rule. Fifth, by accepting Athenian subjugation the Melians would be growing into their nature as an island city and abandoning the “wrong choice”[43] of isolation and embrace the policy of internationalism which will mutually benefit Athens and Melos in a win-win scenario (thereby implying that all politics is not a zero-sum game as the Melians seem to think).

If the Melians were intelligent as the Athenians are intelligent, whose intelligence is shown in their statement of having discovered the law of nature which they are now acting in accord with, then the Melians would have recognized the law of nature which determined them to be under Athenian rule. However, the Melians, as the Athenians end their dialogue by saying, have deluded themselves through the principle of hope and have brought ruination unto themselves. The Athenians are mere instruments of judgement against a people so obstinate and unintelligent as to recognize the law of nature so they must invariably be trampled over by those who exude the law of nature and are moved by it.

Thucydides is complicit in the Athenian destruction of the Melos. His reticence, coupled with his earlier statement that human nature being what it is and that his work is intended to teach generations forever to come, reveals that Thucydides agrees with the Athenian disposition and understanding of nature and self-interest. The Melian Dialogue and the fate of the Melians is a tale of instruction, not of restraint, but on the importance of knowing the law of nature which ought to necessitate decision-making accordingly. By not acting in accord with the law of nature the destruction of Melos was self-induced. And, as Thucydides repeatedly shows over the course of the dialogue, the Athenians constantly offered a path of survival and prosperity for the Melians until the Melians forced their hand in refusing to submit to the Athenian Empire. Failure to embody nature has dire consequences as the Melians find out the hard way. But we, as readers and learners from Thucydides, do not have to follow the same path as the Melians even though, as the Athenians imply, there will be other Athens’ in the future.

Nature had necessitated the Athenians to enforce their control over the “islanders” because failure to do so would prove fatal to the Athenians. As we’ve already covered, the geopolitical constitution of Athens is that of the sea. By this matter of geographic fact, Athens must ensure her dominance of the sea by controlling all the maritime polities. This is where her strength lies, as the Corcyraeans know and as Pericles openly states. Nature has determined that Melos is a sea power, an island power, a maritime polity that necessarily moves it under Athenian orbit.

The conflict of self-interest is not in Athens against Melos, per se, but is in Melos not embodying her geopolitical nature—which is to say, not following her self-interest. Athens is simply embodying her geopolitical nature which is necessitated by its geographic constitution. Melos had the opportunity to embrace her geopolitical nature which would have saved the city, her customs and traditions, and brought new prosperity and political security. Rather than recognize her geopolitical nature, Melos retreated into the abstractions of freedom and hope and subsequently lost both. The geopolitical reality of Melos meant that her self-interest was to ally with Athens. She opted not to do so and suffered the consequences of not embodying her nature.

Enemies by Nature: Hermocrates’ Speech Against Athens

The final speech I wish to examine is Hermocrates’ speech to his “fellow Sicilians.” Hermocrates’ speech is unique insofar that he appeals directly to nature, rather than customs, conventions, or the gods. But what does Hermocrates mean when he speaks of nature in his speech? He doesn’t refer to race as the natural unifying bond; in fact, he recognizes the racial differences that constitute the populations on the island.[44] Instead, he appeals to “Sicily as a whole.”[45] Hermocrates’ appeal to nature is an appeal to Sicily and all her cities and diverse peoples. They must, then, have something in common despite being separated by racial, linguistic, and political differences.

According to Hermocrates, “Sicily” is united by a common enemy: Athens. As he says so eloquently and with deep perception, “[W]e have also to consider whether we can still preserve the existence of Sicily as a whole. It is now, as I see it, being threatened by Athens, and we ought to regard the Athenians as much more forcible arguments for peace than any words that can be spoken by me. They are the greatest power in Hellas.”[46] The Athenians in Sicily are few but Hermocrates sees the future invasion of Sicily as the logical outcome of Athenian power and her control of the sea. In fact, Hermocrates recourses to the geographic dialectic formerly espoused by Pericles about the world being divided by land and sea. When speaking of Sicily as a whole, Hermocrates says that the Sicilians, though they live on land in a nominal sense, are surrounded by the sea, “[W]e are all of us neighbors, living together in the same country, in the midst of the sea.”[47]

Hermocrates, then, has ascertained the law of nature and the geopolitical constitution of Sicily. Though he is from the most powerful city in Sicily, Syracuse, Sicily is divided by race, custom, and language. Yet the world refers to all, as Hermocrates says, as “Sicilians.” What makes the diverse island united is not just a common enemy in Athens but the geopolitical reality of Sicily. Sicily is an island jewel “in the midst of the sea.” Divided, Sicily is weak and prone to Athenian intervention and subjugation. United, however, Sicily could be strong and the natural counterweight to Athenian maritime dominance.

Sicily has long been envisioned as the crowning achievement of the Athenian Empire. Sicily is a rich island. Sicily is situated in the center of the known world. From Sicily one could have a base of operations to control the entire Mediterranean. From Sicily one could have a floating city in which ships, merchants, and colonists could spread to Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and North Africa. Since Athens already controlled the eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean and Ionian seas and coastlines, Sicily is the great temptation for Athenian grandeur and daring.

Hermocrates realizes the perilous position that Sicily is in. When he speaks to his fellow Sicilians, who are Dorians and Chalcidians and Phoenicians, his appeal to nature is premised on a geopolitical cornerstone which finds a common enemy in Athens and maintains Sicily as a potential maritime polity in-of-itself. The petty divisions which have caused war in Sicily can all be overcome in the unity against Athens and the amalgamation of the many Sicilian city-states under a united political entity (undoubtedly to be led by Syracuse). “By acting in this way,” Hermocrates ends his speech, “we shall be conferring immediately two benefits on Sicily – release from the Athenians and the cessation of civil war; and for the future we shall have a country that is free in itself and not so much in danger from abroad.”[48]

Since, however, Sicily is a (rising) sea power, why didn’t Hermocrates align with Athens as Melos should have done?

Hermocrates’ speech is, therefore, an instructive contrast with the Melians. Hermocrates doesn’t appeal to convention or hope like the Melians do. Instead, Hermocrates appeals to nature. Sicily is also on the periphery of Athenian power in a way that Melos never was. Moreover, Sicily is strong where Melos is weak. Syracuse is a very strong city-state in its own right; thus it isn’t surprising that it is the Syracusan Hermocrates that spurs the advocacy of Sicilian unity (out of self-interest).

Because Sicily is strong and is potentially even stronger if united, Sicily is the enemy of Athens and the natural counterweight to Athenian maritime power. Sicily has the potential, as Hermocrates implies, to become the greatest power in the world and the dominant maritime polity superseding even Athens.[49] (Sicily could be that other Athens the Athenians warn the Melians of.) In being free from invasion from abroad Sicily would have the power to engage in her own foreign adventures. Moreover, just as Sicily is the springboard for Athenian dominance over the world, Sicily is already situated to be the great empire to control the world. Alas, Hermocrates’ vision of united Sicily and Sicilian Empire didn’t come to pass though he did achieve secondary goals of bringing civil war and internal division to an end. More importantly, he achieved these goals before the Athenian invasion he prophetically foresaw.

Hermocrates’ speech is instructive because it also shows, unlike with the future dialogue between the Athenians and Melians, how the embrace of nature can lead to the survival and growth of conventions and traditions. “[L]et us realize,” Hermocrates says at the acme of his speech, “that by following my advice we shall each keep the freedom of our own cities, and in these will be able to act in the true spirit of independent men, returning good for good and evil for evil; whereas if we take the opposite course we shall be under the power of others, and then there will no longer be any question of our being able to do harm to an opponent.”[50] Sicilian independence and power, power most importantly, rests on the “Sicilians” putting aside their differences and embracing their geopolitical nature. The mark of nature is power and the ability to “harm an opponent.” Thus we see, as implied by Hermocrates’ acknowledgement of the reality of nature and power, that Sicily does not need to yield to Athenian subjugation precisely because Sicily has the strength to subjugate others—“to do harm to an opponent” is a component of one’s freedom.

The Athenians are the “enemies by nature” of the Sicilians because the Athenians threaten Sicilian unity and power. The Athenians are the “enemies by nature” of the Sicilians because they are both rival maritime civilizations with the potential to rule the world. The Athenians are the “enemies by nature” of the Sicilians because the Athenians plan on conquering Sicily, colonizing it, and taking “the good things of Sicily”[51] for themselves. Hermocrates’ speech, his appeal for peace and unity, is founded primarily on a geopolitical dimension. The law of nature has been discovered by Hermocrates, and Hermocrates intends to have his fellow Sicilians follow it for their salvation.

The Eternality of Thucydides’ Work

It seems evidently clear that the law of nature which Thucydides examines is a geopolitical one. This returns us to the naturalistic sine qua non that Thucydides takes as his axiomatic foundation to understanding human nature, human action, and the course of events. Insofar that Thucydides doesn’t appeal to a moral law established by God or the gods, insofar that Thucydides doesn’t appeal to supernatural events and omens as reasons for human actions and their outcomes, and insofar that Thucydides only looks to naturalistic causes for the war, he seems rather modern.

However, it is also clear from any reading of Thucydides that he does accept human nature—and that human nature tends toward evil. Convention, by contrast, civilizes men and makes him a noble animal. When law dissipates, as it does through war, nature (re)asserts itself. When nature (re)asserts itself the nature that rises to the fore is a geopolitical one—since man is a political animal and, more importantly, is found to living in a land or sea constitution as Pericles stated. As such, men either embrace their geopolitical nature or forsake it.

But Thucydides’ geopolitical law of nature is not a Jared Diamond-esque geographic determinism where human choice, intelligence, and will have no factor to play in the inevitable success or decline of a people and their civilization. Geography may dictate the path that people should take, but Thucydides leaves open the reality of human free will in making decisions—often with disastrous consequences for the wrong decisions. We see disastrous consequences repeatedly and we see many blunders made by fallible human agents. In carving out space for human cunning, intelligence, and free choice, Thucydides’ work is a triumph not only of political philosophy but of philosophy more generally. His work is a triumph in examining the seminal philosophical question: Quid sit homo.

Thucydides’ War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians equally shows the paradoxical dichotomy and dynamism of human nature. Man is at once a slave to his geopolitical constitution yet has the power, through his free choice, intelligence, and reason, to thrive or die in the nature imposed onto him by geography. Thucydides doesn’t give us answers to the seminal questions of life but teaches us to think, and think deeply, about the seminal questions of life. Thucydides doesn’t answer the question of justice. Thucydides doesn’t answer the question of the good life. Yet Thucydides allows us to think about justice and the good life. Precisely because Thucydides’ work teaches us to think about the important questions of political life and human events it truly is a work that “will last forever.” And “last forever” it has.

This article was originally published at VoegelinView, 6 January 2020, under the title “The Geopolitical Law of Nature in Thucydides.”

Notes

[1] David Bolotin, “Thucydides,” in History of Political Philosophy, eds. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 6.

[2] I have opted for the traditional naming of the work of Thucydides now commonly known as the History of the Peloponnesian War. Unless noted otherwise, all citations come from Rex Warner’s translation, The History of the Peloponnesian War (New York: Penguin Books, 1972). I have opted to follow Warner’s notations of chapter and section (by paragraph) for easier reader access and referencing than following the traditional Renaissance notations.

[3] Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 7-8.

[4] Ibid., 240-241.

[5] Cf. Thucydides, I.22.2; III.82.1.

[6] Ibid., I.22.2.

[7] Strauss, 166.

[8] See Donald Kagan, Thucydides: The Reinvention of History (New York: Viking Press, 2009).

[9] See David Bolotin, “Thucydides,” in History of Political Philosophy, 6-32.

[10] Thucydides, I.24.1.

[11] Ibid., I.30.2.

[12] Ibid., II.62.1.

[13] Ibid., I.32.2.

[14] Ibid., I.33.1.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., I.36.1.

[17] Ibid., I.38.1.

[18] Ibid., I.43.1.

[19] Ibid., I.41.1.

[20] Ibid., I.43.1.

[21] Ibid., I.37.2.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., I.73.3-74.1.

[24] Strauss, 169.

[25] Thucydides, I.77.1.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid., II.39.1.

[28] Ibid., II.39.1.

[29] Ibid., II.38.1.

[30] See Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

[31] Herodotus, Histories, 8.28-29.

[32] It seems to me, however, that Wittfogel’s study misses one key element though it is nevertheless entailed in the general thesis of his work—population is also a factor in societies of “total power” because extensive irrigated agrarian societies need large populations to force the labor necessary for such a society’s construction and sustenance. Therefore, when a society lacks the population needed in having an extensive irrigated agrarian mode of production, it either does not develop toward total despotism and veers toward the path of agrarian republicanism (as in ancient, pre-imperial, Italy) or requires slavery to necessitate its development down the path of totalizing tyranny.

[33] Thucydides, II.39.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid., II.62.

[36] Ibid., V.84.3.

[37] Ibid., V.89.1

[38] Ibid., V.105.1.

[39] Ibid., V.95.1-99.1

[40] Ibid., V.93.1

[41] Ibid., V.99.1

[42] Ibid., V.103.1.

[43] Ibid., V.111.1.

[44] Ibid., IV.61.1.

[45] Ibid., IV.59.1.

[46] Ibid., IV.60.1.

[47] Ibid., IV.64.1.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid., IV.62.2; IV.63.1.

[50] Ibid., IV.63.1.

[51] Ibid., IV.61.1.

________________________________________________________________

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 The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and the forthcoming book Diseases, Disasters, and Political Theory. 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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Roger Scruton. Confessions of a Heretic. Kendal, UK: Notting Hill, 2021.

“Heretic might seem like a strong word to describe Roger Scruton,” writes Douglas Murray in his introduction to a new edition of Roger Scruton’s anthology of essays Confessions of a Heretic. In the wake of Roger’s death in 2020, the British public and cultural intelligentsia lost a figure who was one of a kind. As Murray notes, “After all, while other people might have been able to write one of his books, who else could have written them all?” As a former student of Roger’s, when asked what of the many voluminous works of the sage to read, where should I point them? His writings on Wagner? His writings on aesthetics and architecture? His writings on conservatism? What about wine? Perhaps this little volume now suffices.

If people know anything about Roger Scruton it is that he was something of a conservative philosopher. In a world dominated by pseudo-intellectuals, almost all of whom are liberal or lefties, Roger stood apart. Not merely because he was a self-declared conservative, but also because he wasn’t a “faker” in the intellectual life. It is, then, appropriate that this short volume of essays begins with a distinction between the liar and the fake; the liar is bad enough, the faker, worse—and Roger undresses the fake.

Roger’s academic life came to an end not because of he lacked intellectual substance—far from it, the fact that even after he embarked on a career outside of the academy and still wrote well-received works on Kant, Spinoza, and introductions for Oxford University Press speaks for his intellectual depth. It was because he dared challenge the public leftwing orthodoxy by skewering leftwing icons in 1986: Thinkers of the New Left, now republished as Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. The fact that Roger wrote on politics, wine, music, art, beauty, philosophy, religion, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Wagner, and other individuals and subject matter is a testament to his erudition not amateurism as unread critics might charge (which was all too common in critiques of Roger; the great unlearned and unread, faking as if they were learned, assaulting a man who was unarguably learned and read). Per Murray, “After all, while other people might have been able to write one of his books, who else could have written them all?”

But perhaps Roger’s excommunication from the Ivory Tower was to his benefit. He enjoyed the freedom of life as a result of that excommunication. He still won the laurels and admiration of others despite not being a tenured professor at Oxbridge or the Ivies.

Confessions of a Heretic is Roger’s attempt to bring together the depth of his intellectual considerations. Art, music, politics, animals, conservationism, nationhood, the meaning of conservatism, are all sampled by the selection of essays offered in this pithy little volume originally published in 2016 but now given a brilliant short introduction by his late in life friend Douglas Murray whose short introduction sets the stage and context for Roger’s life and work.

I have written elsewhere that the Roger I knew, and that the Roger that everyone should know, is the Roger of love. If there is one theme that unites the seemingly disparate collection of essays ranging from how to love animals to music to politics to environment, it is love. Roger’s wrestling with love, its meaning, purpose, and our own bastardization of love in modernity—turning it either into a commodity of utilization or sentimental kitsch—is what is found spanning the anthology of essays.

For instance, in dealing with kitsch and faking artistic genius, Roger writes, “All sentimentality is like this: it redirects emotion from the object to the subject, so as to create a fantasy of emotion without the real cost of feeling it.” In other words, rather than love objects for their own worth and value, we fake love of objects to make ourselves feel good. Kitsch is the ultimate form of narcissism. Though “Faking It” is an essay mostly on art, we can draw connections and conclusions to the tyranny of sentimental political activism so dominant in 2022 and beyond. “Kitsch tells you how nice you are.” How nice I must be to engage in the empty platitude of political marches while doing nothing to change my life to make an impact in what I’m marching for, I cannot help but thinking.

Roger was also a conservationist. While he hesitated to use the term environmentalism, he often went to great lengths defending conservatism and conservation of nature. To him, being conservative meant taking the natural order of the world seriously. His essay “Loving Animals” and “Conserving Nature” give the reader the green side of Roger’s personal and political thinking as it relates to the conservative’s relation to the world and not just the market. We see in these essays love as governing Roger’s heart in his relationship to animals and the British countryside.

If he is most famous as a conservative political thinker—though I think he was far more than that—his essays “Governing Rightly,” “The Need for Nations,” and “Defending the West” highlight Roger’s ruminations on the nature of conservatism in political philosophy and international political theory. Perhaps scandalously to American anti-government militants, Roger reminds us that conservatism—properly understood—isn’t about hostility to government but articulating the proper bounds of government which is necessary for us to live a social and, therefore, free and loving life. We are not free in the state of nature. Neither are we socialized, civilized, and loving. We learn to love in social organizations, mature our love in association, and find pride in our communities and nations precisely because we live in orderly countries with governments that honor our sociality and loving hearts rather than attempting to socially engineer sociality and impose a new morality of love upon us.

I have found the Roger of aesthetics, principally in architecture and music, to be the secret Roger that few people know about but whom we should all become acquainted with. While his trilogy on Wagner would be a great place to get a fuller treatment Roger’s musical tastes and philosophical erudition, and while his writing on beauty for Oxford University Press includes a fuller treatment of the importance of beauty regards to architecture and public space, the essays “Building to Last” and “Mourning our Losses” (a reflection on Richard Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” and the musical tradition of elegy) expose the reader to another side, the aesthetic side, to Roger. Yet again, however, we find love as the underpinning element to those essays as well: love in ordered beauty and love in the form of mourning and elegy.

Given his recent death, the essay “Dying in Time” takes on greater poignancy than when first published. But in between the lines what gives Roger the impetus to reflect on death and dying is a life well-lived, in other words, a life that was loved and loving which causes one to be thankful for life rather than hostile and angry at it. Maybe those getting close to that stage can pick up and no longer be frightened. Those of us still far away from that stage can take the wisdom of a now deceased sage and be prepared for that inevitable encounter and do so with grace and love instead of fear and regret.

If there is primer, a short introduction, to Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic is it. While only 11 essays, the relative brevity of this book doesn’t negate the penetrating depth of the considerations contained therein. As Douglas Murray reminds us at the conclusion of his introduction, “While the length of his own life is over, its depths remain here as in other volumes: ready for new generations of readers to discover and find deep fulfillment in.”

This review was originally published at VoegelinView, 27 February 2022.

________________________________________________________________

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 The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and the forthcoming book 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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Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

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The Discourses of Livy shows that Machiavelli favors a republic over all other forms of government—even though the real political dialectic is between republics and non-republics (i.e. tyrannies). Machiavelli prefers republican governance mostly for state and practical purposes. While Machiavelli certainly is a fan of liberty and order, he does not believe people are naturally inclined to liberty though they may be inclined to order through servility. The task then is to awaken or inculcate a spirit of liberty in the herd.

Monarchy, oligarchy, and indeed, anarchistic democracy, are insufficient in doing this. In this way all of those other forms of government are, in Machiavelli’s reductionism, alternative forms of tyranny where some, or many, are servile slaves to the rule of one, a few, or the majority. Republics, on the other hand, in giving the greatest representation of all interests of society a stake in the body politic, allow for the greatest amount of “buy-in” from its citizens.

It is an engaged citizenry, not a passive citizenry, that is the root of liberty. Had it not been for the active citizenry in responding to the rape and murder of Lucretia, Rome would still have slumbered under the tyranny of Tarquin and his sons and their descendants. Had it not been for the active citizenry which constituted the majority of the Roman population, the plebeians, Rome’s manpower pool and ability to shepherd great will and common commitment to defeating her neighbors could never have come about—thereby having allowed other powers to trample on Rome and take away Roman liberty. Had it not been for the active citizens who led Rome in her dark hours, whether Cincinnatus or Decius or Torquates, whose individual actions inspired their citizens and soldiers to persevere, Roman liberty would have been extinguished by Rome’s foes.

Machiavelli is a theorist of liberty. But his philosophy of liberty is not one of natural liberty a la John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Thomas Paine. Machiavelli’s theory of liberty is a liberty that emerges with struggle and the willingness to expand, or reclaim, liberty by actions of the will. Liberty and order are not antagonistic to each other. As proven by the Conflict of the Orders and Rome’s rise to greatness, the persevering order of the Roman state corresponded with her growth in liberty afforded to the multitude beyond the patrician class. That said, liberty is not necessarily guaranteed under excessive order. But excessive order which doesn’t permit enough liberty is a fragile order, again seen through the history of Tarquin and his sons. Maximum order comes with maximum liberty—but this is not a licentious liberty, it is a liberty that sustains itself through duties to protect it which require citizen engagement and sacrifice.

Therefore, the republic is the only suitable form of government for liberty and order to flourish for a long period of time. While all earthly things come to an end, those earthly polities that had the longest life were those polities that struck the balance of liberty and order by giving a great stake in its wellbeing to its citizens. Because republics give the greatest stake to the masses, the masses will more willingly defend the republic and fight for the republic than in tyrannical forms of government.

There is an ironic statism entailed in all this. For the longevity of the state it is in the state’s own interest to give its citizens a great deal of liberty. In doing so the citizens feel attached to their state for the liberty they have under it and will be more willing to fight and die for the state under the liberty they enjoy. In this sense liberty and statism go together in Machiavelli’s outlook. And that is what the Discourses and The Prince are all about: How best to maintain and run a state and all the functions of governance and political stewardship. According to Machiavelli, the best way to do this is through republican states which, in giving liberty and providing stability to its citizens, and honoring and promoting the religion of the people, is able to depend upon its citizens to undertake the hardships and sacrifices sometimes necessary in the bloody struggle that characterizes life on earth.

Thus, even in Machiavelli’s preference for republicanism we see his political realism—realpolitik—on full display. Political realism, not idealism, was the cause of his support for republican regimes. This is essential when understanding Machiavelli and the modern world.

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Plotinus is arguably the most influential philosopher few people know about, and even fewer have read.  His most famous work, The Enneads, established the systematic philosophy known as Neoplatonism.  Plotinus’s metaphysics, ontology, and aesthetics would later become very important to Christianity, Humanism, medieval mysticism, the revival of Neoplatonism during the Renaissance, and also German Idealism and Romanticism (especially Hegel).  From this lineage, Plotinus is even a hidden influencer upon Marxism.  Furthermore, much of our inherited predisposition to understanding Plato comes through the lens of Plotinus and how he understood Plato.

Admittedly, Neoplatonism is a rather poor name for those not trained in philosophy.  Although Plotinus was a devotee of Plato, Neoplatonic philosophy equally owes a great deal to Pythagoreanism and Aristotelianism too; in some sense, Plotinus can be seen as a reaction against the empiricism of Aristotelianism while still retaining a strong Aristotelian influence.  Plotinus’s philosophy is also a direct challenge to Epicurean materialism, placing emphasis back on the primacy of one’s soul (the seat of rational intellect) against sensation and bodily pleasure.

Plotinus’s metaphysics is rooted in Plato’s metaphysics, but he ultimately builds upon Plato rather than recoursing back and promoting strict Platonism.  Where Plato promoted the Theory of Forms, Plotinus embraces “the One.”  The One is “the good” and the beautiful, it is ultimately the source of the Forms.  The problem with the traditional Platonist Theory of the Forms is there are many Forms.  Plotinus ultimately understood this to mean the Forms are the single foundation of reality, hence why Plato is recognized as a metaphysic monist.  However, Plotinus felt that Plato’s Forms was left unfinished.  Just like how Aristotle thought Platonic philosophy only grasped the material and formal causes, Plotinus’s return to Plato is to advance Plato to the Final Cause that Aristotle speaks of in his Metaphysics.  Thus, we can already identify Aristotelian influences upon Plotinus – though Plotinus rejects the quasi-utilitarianism of Aristotle.  Plotinus, then, identifies the One as the Final Cause, so to speak, the source that all the Forms are rooted in – the “Absolute Idea.”

Plotinus’s metaphysics is also hierarchal.  But it is classical pyramidal in nature, rather than vertical.  That is, the One situates itself at the top of the pinnacle.  Emanation proceeds downward, expanding horizontally (becoming wider as it emanates downward).  The bottom of the hierarchal emanation schema is the widest horizontally, but as one moves back upward toward the One, the path narrows back to ultimate source.  Owing to Aristotle, the One is simultaneously Arche (beginning) and Telos (end).  Everything has its ultimate source in the Good that is the One, and this goodness of the One (and beauty of the One) is what draws everything back to it to reflect and embody life, goodness, and beauty.

Plotinus’s understanding of evil is influential – though it reached fuller crystallization in St. Augustine.  Ultimately, nothing can be evil (strictly speaking) since everything is sourced in the One.  However, as Plotinus recounts in Enneads 1.6, the rational intellect that debases its rationality by focusing only on material things, becomes the “ugly soul.”  That is to say, concentration on things material (material cause only) eventually leads to the debasement of the intellect, which is the soul, and leads to ugliness because the materially obsessed intellect foolishly believes that the material cause is all there is – in this reason suppresses its own desire for wisdom.  The lack of rationality, which exhausts itself in ignorance and low beauty, is the basis of what we come to “evil” on the understanding that “evil” is a destructive force which destroys that which is good and beautiful precisely because of the lack of rational cultivation.

Perhaps more confusingly, the One is entirely self-sufficient.  It does not need to cause anything.  But since the One embodies goodness, it emanates goodness and beauty from itself, bringing into being the source of everything in the world (though it by no means was compelled to do so).  Here begins Plotinus’s most famous doctrine – the doctrine of Emanation (which replaces Plato’s Forms in Neoplatonic thought).

II

Plotinus’s metaphysics is undergirded by the doctrine of emanation.  Emanation is difficult to understand for non-readers of Plotinus.  Emanation does not mean A to B to C in a linear and ablating manner (i.e. A ceases to be when it reaches and begets B).  Plotinus, here, really follows Aristotle’s metaphysical logic: A to B, B subsumes A, B(+A) leads to C, which subsumes B(+A), etc.  Plotinian emanationism is a scheme of ontological dependency and greater fulfillment in dependency.

The first emanation from the One is Intellect.  That is to say, intellect (reason) is the first principle of existence (wisdom is the first principle of being and existence in Plotinus – this view is also very important to understanding the Christian doctrine of creation, especially as passed down by Augustine in Confessions and De Genesi Ad Literram).  Everything in existence is brought into existence by reason.  Intellect is where the sources of the Forms are located.  This is how one has innate ideas.  Intellect is the source of knowledge, goodness, wisdom, etc.  From intellect emerges the material.  Here we should see Plotinus’s inheritance of Aristotle:

1. Intellect is the first principle of being and knowledge.
2. Intellect brings into existence being.
3. Intellect also brings into existence materiality.
4. Material existence is rationally ordered and structured by Intellect .

Therefore, Intellect is the efficient cause of structures (formal cause) and materiality (material cause).  This implies that everything is understandable because everything is rational.  Plotinus is another classical rationalist, much like Plato – to be rational is what it means to be human (the unrational person devolves into sub-humanness – the “ugly soul”).  Ultimately, then, intellect must be cultivated to know itself and the innate ideas one has which can be sourced back to the One which would represent the fulfillment of knowledge (and happiness).  If I am reason then I must be reasonable to know myself.  (In some way even Descartes’s cogito ergo sum is influenced by Plotinus – as is the entire European and Catholic rationalist traditions.)

Intellect, or rational thought, for Plotinus, constitutes life.  The thinking intellect (much like the active intellect in Aristotle) is the intellect fully functioning.  Thinking is the first principle of the intellect.  The second principle of the intellect is the actualization of thinking, which is the coming to know our innate ideas.  In other words, intellectual actualization is the coming to understand knowledge and truth.  Intellectual actualization is also how one comes to know thyself.  In this manner too, the intellect “reunites” in union (henosis) with its ultimate source: The One/Good.  Hence, the end to intellect is union with the One, which is the Good, which is how one achieves knowledge and self-actualization (which is higher than simple self-awareness).  Self-awareness can be understood as the intermediary principle between thinking and actualization.

The second emanation of the One is soul, which, properly, is actually an emanation of intellect but in being an emanation of intellect is contingently still related to the One.  Soul is the root of desire in Plotinus, but only insofar that the soul brings awareness of bodily desire, which is to say, life to the material, moreover the soul desires goodness, knowledge, and beauty as part of the innate want for wisdom and happiness.  But only the soul in harmony with intellect can achieve the end of its desire: happiness.  Happiness derives from goodness, knowledge, the fully active intellect, and Beauty, etc.  At first the soul desires material things, or things external to itself, to attempt to satisfy its wants and understand innate ideas.  (Again, Plotinus follows Aristotle in that understanding material cause is the first stepping stone to moving up to knowledge of Final Cause.)  The soul will not be satiated until it returns in union with the One.  Love, then, is an ontological state of being in Plotinus.  It is not mere action.  Actions reflect the desire for love, which is the upward dialectic ascent of the soul back to the One.  The fulfillment of want of love is love (by definition).  Plotinus, here, engages in a primitive form of anthropology.

Just as intellect desires union with ultimate goodness, which is its source, soul desires knowledge and the understanding of desire itself which ties it to intellect and then the intellect is the rope, so to speak, pulling the soul back up to the One.  In this manner the soul is related in dependency to the intellect.  The One is the source of intellect, intellect is an emanation of the One and therefore dependent upon the One, intellect emanates the soul which is dependent on intellect, and contingently related to the One as well since the One is the source of ontological dependence of intellect.

“The good soul” or “beautiful soul” is the soul that desires knowledge, and in the desiring of knowledge, leads to the first principle of the intellect: thinking.  Desire propels the thinking intellect to self-reflect, understand its own desires, and then proceed to intellectual actualization.  In intellectual actualization, the intellect and soul are united in harmony with the knowledge of the Forms, which then proceeds into a union with the One.

Thus, we should be able to understand Plotinus’s ontological dependency.  There are many desires of the soul (base).  These desires find fulfillment in intellect understanding why the soul desires (middle).  Understanding desire demands the ordering nature and cultivation of rationality (high).  This leads to understanding of self, desire, and knowledge (higher).  Eventually, intellect “returns to the Fountain of the Good.”  Desire is dependent upon the intellect for its fulfillment.  Intellect is propelled into thinking by desire.  The intellect’s thinking moved by desire leads to actualization.  Actualization is coming to understand truth and wisdom.  Therefore, Intellect is dependent upon the truth and wisdom which is dimly lit in all persons through innate ideas which emanate from the One.  Knowledge leads to intellectual union with the Source of Wisdom, knowledge, goodness, and beauty – which is the One.

Plotinus’s account of ontological dependency rests as such: desire finds its immediate fulfillment in intellect, but its ultimate fulfillment is the intellect’s coming to know wisdom, which is the union with the source of goodness, knowledge, and beauty.  Hence, A (desire/soul) finds fulfillment in B (intellect), B(+A) (intellect + desire) finds fulfillment in coming to know innate ideas (C), and knowing these innate ideas leads to C(B+A) (knowledge + intellect + soul) coming into union with D (the One), which is the ultimate fulfillment of knowledge, intellect, and soul.  The Intellect that fails to satisfy desire is the “non-thinking” intellect (or Aristotle’s “passive intellect”).  The whole ontological schema is one of dependence and enhancing fulfillment toward telos.

Evil, which is rational suppression, occurs when one deliberately attempts to cease intellectual thinking.  When this occurs, desire still operates but takes over.  Desire subsequently lashes out at the material because the intellect is not proceeding to thinking, which prevents self-actualization and coming to know the Forms, which is a suppression of knowledge and union with the One.  Plotinus writes that the evil soul is the one preoccupied with only material things, this is because the soul’s desire have no intellectual fulfillment.  It then becomes preoccupied only with material things which it can see and control.  This is the root of evil in Plotinus’s philosophy because concern only with material cause is low knowledge and fails to satisfies intellectual actualization, and, worst, the concern with just the material cuts the Intellect off from the One which subsequently leads to deformed rationality proclaiming its deformity as “truth” which ends with the destruction of beauty and failure to attain true knowledge.

III

Beauty is also central topic in Plotinus’s Enneads, and is at the heart of Neoplatonic philosophy. His commentary on Beauty, Ennead I.6, is widely recognized as one of the most influential commentaries on the nature of beauty in Western literature.  In his opening he writes, “Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations of words and in all kinds of music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues. What loftier beauty there may be, yet, our argument will bring to light.”

For Plotinus, understanding beauty is the highest end of the intellect because Beauty is the highest good to be understood in relationship to the One.  In the same manner that knowledge is virtue in Aristotle, knowledge of Beauty also leads to virtue in Plotinus, “there is the beauty of the virtues” and “[t]hen again, all the virtues are a beauty of the soul, a beauty authentic beyond any of these others.”  The knowledgeable is the virtuous because the virtuous defends the Beautiful because the Beautiful is knowledge, and knowledge is what the soul desires, and is the highest order of intellectual activity (intellectual actualization).

Plotinus, here, underscores his concept of henosis.  The ultimate reason why human intellect and soul desires knowledge is because, “The Good, which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and Principle of Beauty: the Primal Good and the Primal Beauty have the one dwelling-place and, thus, always, Beauty’s seat is there.”  The Good is synonymous with the Beautiful.  In being drawn toward Beauty, which is a form of intellectual actualization and knowledge, one comes to an understanding of the Good.  To understand the Good is to understand the One, or the source of intellect and desire.  This means that the highest good is Beauty, and Beauty draws active intellect to itself, which ends in the attainment of wisdom and the ultimate satisfaction of the desires of the soul.

However, to find fulfillment in Beauty entails rational cultivation, which will lead to excellence/virtue.  Only the actualized intellect will understand Formal Beauty and Goodness, which is rooted in the Good/the One.  Here, again, we see the emphasis upon Plotinus’s rationalism.  While desire propels intellect, desire gets nowhere without the proper cultivation of rationality and understanding of knowledge, which is the understanding of the Forms, which inevitably leads to henosis with the One.

Desire can recognize the innate idea of beauty.  One does not need to be too terribly intelligent to recognize sublimis (the Sublime) when one sees it.  As Plotinus said at the opening of Enneads I.6, “Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight.”  However, this is “only a taste of beauty,” or a “taste of knowledge.”  The taste for beauty, that is the taste for want of knowledge, becomes what consumes desire and propels the intellect to find the source and understanding of that which it desires.  This can only be satisfied with absolute knowledge.  To know beauty is to know truth, to know truth is to know beauty.

Thus, Plotinus’s proto-humanism, which later comes to influence Augustine and the Catholic Humanist tradition, typified most explicitly in the Renaissance Humanism of the likes of Giovanni Pico Mirandola, is that humanity’s capacity for reason plays an integral role in the cultivation of virtue, the shaping of the good, or beautiful, soul, and ultimately the coming to knowledge of the One and the attainment of the happiness that desire seeks.  Augustine, for instance, draws explicitly upon Plotinus in that logos harmonizes in union with desire to attain wisdom and happiness.  In the more theological nature of Christianity, this is remembered as intentio unionis (intention of union) and intentio communis (intention of communion).  Furthermore, Plotinus produces an early account of weltgeist, or World Spirit – which is the universal allure of our innate ideas back to what Hegel calls “Absolute Idea” (which is can be understood as analogous to Plotinus’s the One).

IV

The ultimate end to Plotinus’s philosophy is the primacy of reason to life, wisdom, and happiness.  Since reason is the first emanation and the first principle of existence, rational cultivation is required to actually understand existence and being in the first place.  The pull to rational cultivation is the result of the innate ideas that humans possess, which is an ontological emanation from wisdom itself.  In other words, wisdom draws the soul to propelling intellect into self-actualization (which, again, is higher than simple self-awareness).

Plotinus’s rationalism became a major influence upon Augustinian Christianity, but it was also prominent in certain Islamic circles as well (Islamic Neoplatonism) which was best reflected in the likes of Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Avempace (Ibn Bâjja).  Avicenna was a Persian Muslim Neoplatonist, while Avempace was a North African Mulsim Neoplatonism (Neoplatonism in Islamic North Africa remained prominent because of the role of the Maliki School of Fiqh recoursing back to ancestral customs and traditions – and having inherited, through conquest, the lands that were most heavily indebted to Augustinian Christianity, the Maliki School drew heavily from Augustine’s own Neoplatonism).  In fact, most scholars already know that Umayyad Islamic theology and philosophy (in North Africa and Spain) was heavily inspired and influenced by Augustinianism.

Unconsciously most of the Western tradition’s understanding of Plato comes from Plotinus, whom was Plato’s most devoted disciple despite living in the 3rd century C.E.  Plotinus also established the fullest doctrine of dependent emanationism in philosophy.  Plotinus also systematized classical rationalism in a very codified and laid out manner, which is contingently related to his philosophy of dependent emanationism and ontological dependency.  Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Plotinus elevated the place of Beauty to the highest and most absolute good in Western philosophy.  Beauty permeates in all things.  This was Plotinus’s most significant influence upon Augustine, and as a result, the doctrine of sublimis (the sublime) in Christianity

Despite being the founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus’s Neoplatonism owes much to Aristotle and not just adjustments to Platonism.  Neoplatonism is not simply Platonic.  Furthermore, Plotinus is a monist since all things have the being, existence, and dependence, upon the One.  (This aspect of Plotinus is ultimately rejected by orthodox Catholicism because of the plurality of the Godhead which also means creation is pluralistic in Christianity rather than monistic as in Plotinus, e.g. reason alone.)  Plotinus’s doctrine of emanation, especially ontological dependence, along with his strong emphasis on the primacy of Beauty, and the role that rational intellect plays in coming to know knowledge and satisfy desire, are among his most longstanding influences and legacies in the Western philosophical tradition, even if virtually no one has heard of him, let alone read him if they vaguely are familiar with the name.

Plotinus’s influences are far reaching.  As Bertrand Russell explained in his History of Western Philosophy, Plotinus’s greatest influence is ultimately in Catholicism.  There are additional influences from the Plotinian-Augustinian-North African Islamic inheritance as well.  While Augustine is usually seen as the father of humanism, almost all see Plotinus as a stepping stone to Augustine’s humanism, as well as Augustine’s emphasis on ontological and anthropological philosophy (things that are scattered throughout Plotinus’s own works).  St. Bonaventure’s work The Mind’s Road to God, which discusses the role of human intellect coming to know God and this supreme knowledge being the source of full happiness, also shows the extensive influence of Neoplatonism had well into the Middle Ages and beyond.  After all, Renaissance Humanism, which was marked by a revival of Neoplatonism, had two primary influences: Augustine and Plotinus.

At end, then, we can see Plotinus’s greatest contribution to the history of philosophy as being his union of reason with knowledge as leading to the highest happiness possible: knowledge.  Essentially, then, happiness is an intellectual endeavor – the attainment of wisdom is the ultimate happiness that a human can have because it satisfies all the desires of the self.  Wisdom, then, is the universal spirit that calls all into union with it.

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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 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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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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The first half of Augustine’s City of God is a work of cultural and intellectual critique. Famously, Augustine critiques the ideology and mythology of the Roman Empire, pointing out its many flaws, lies, and deceptions. However, he does the same for philosophy too. As such Augustine not only deals with cultural criticism in examining the history of Rome and Roman culture, he also engages in intellectual criticism as well—taking up a critique of Roman religion and Hellenic philosophy (namely Platonism and Stoicism, the two great intellectual influences over him).  Augustine is well known for having been influenced by Platonism (specifically Neoplatonism) and Stoicism (through Cicero).  While having, in a sense, synthesized Platonism, Aristotelianism (through Neoplatonism), and Stoicism into Christianity—or showing where these Hellenic schools of thought were compatible with Christianity—Augustine did not give a free pass to Hellenic philosophy despite his debt to it.

Augustine’s criticism of Hellenic philosophy centers on the prideful nature of philosophy in general, the dim view of the passions (or desire) represented by the Stoics, and a confrontation with one of Christianity’s most notable ancient critics: Porphyry (a student of Plotinus and the man responsible for publishing Plotinus’ Enneads which Augustine read).  At the same time his appraisal of Hellenic philosophy includes a generally very positive view of Platonism, especially anything relating to Plato and Plotinus—for, in Augustine’s mind, the spirit of Platonism was to find the truth.

Augustine’s Praise for Platonism

In critiquing Christianity’s pagan critics, especially Roman religion, Augustine already began to praise Plato by remarking if the Romans were interested in Truth and virtue, they should have built a temple to Plato instead of the lying, jealous, and immoral gods who were worshipped in the Roman pantheon. Augustine praises Plato and Plotinus for several reasons.  First was their commitment to the idea of absolute truth over and against epistemological relativism and nihilism.  Second was the spiritual or transcendental character of their philosophies which leant itself nicely to the service of Christianity.  Third was the Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation and theology which recognized, as Augustine highlighted in his criticism of Porphyry, a primitive understanding of the Christian Trinity. Incomplete and not fully Christian, to be sure, but Plotinus’ theological emanation of the One, Dyad, and Nous, was read to be a primitive (pagan rationalist) glimpse of the Trinity. As such, it also showed the limits of reason rather than the expansivity of reason. (Reason can only get you so far.)

Augustine, like many of the non-sophist philosophers of antiquity, maintained that the telos (natural end) of humans was happiness.  “That all men desire happiness is a truism for all who are in any degree able to use their reason.”  There are several important features of Augustine’s anthropology to note in order to understand his general praise of Platonism, and to a lesser extent Aristotelianism and Stoicism—though he is not without his moments of considerable criticism of all three of these ancient philosophical schools.  Augustine’s anthropology argued that the human being was both a rational and desiring animal; man is endowed with a rational soul (logos; the intellect) but also tremendous phenomenological desire (eros or love).  The unity of logos and eros in the human is what made man like God (since God, conceived of in Christianity is Logos and Eros; Reason and Love; Truth and Desire).  Furthermore, Augustine believed that man was made in love for love, in wisdom for wisdom, and with sufficient rationality to know his nature which would lead to his felicity (happiness) when living in accordance with his nature.  Insofar that Platonism maintained, in a basic sense, all these anthropological characteristics Augustine saw Platonism as a dim or primitive form of Christianity.  As Augustine said in De Doctrina Christiana, “Truth wherever it is found belongs to [God]” (because God is Truth and the source of Truth so, syllogistically speaking, this means truth has to belong to God).  Platonists also maintained that the Supreme God was the Logos; Stoics and Aristotelians also maintained similar doctrines in their philosophies of God but made the mistake of being materialist whereas Platonism was immaterialist.

Because the Platonists believed man’s natural end was happiness, that he had an immortal rational soul capable of knowing the good, true, and beautiful, and because the Platonists—moreover than the Aristotelians or Stoics—held the erotic in a positive purview, Augustine saw Platonist philosophy and anthropology (if we can call the limited reflections on man from the Platonists anthropology—which is properly the gift of Christianity to philosophy) as near to Christianity.  After all, it was Augustine’s Platonism that moved him to Christianity.

The Platonist commitment to truth and virtue were the primary reasons for Augustine’s praise of Platonism. But it was also the Platonist doctrine of emanation, especially as it related to Platonist mystical theology (or cosmology) that Augustine also strongly praised as being an accurate description of the Trinity as far as weak-minded rationalism (given the reality of the Fall for Augustine which we will explore later in this article) was concerned.  Lastly, Augustine saw Christianity and Platonism in agreement in their respective cosmologies insofar that the Cosmos was intelligible and embedded with intelligibility.  (The intelligibility of creation was an essential aspect to Plotinus and is found in the Genesis account where God gives a commandment, or law, to creation to “bring forth life after its own kind”; the difference between Christian cosmology and Platonist cosmology was the role of love in creation.)

Nevertheless, Platonism can only go so far. For Augustine, the truths of Platonism point to Christ and Christianity. For even the Platonists are filled with certain errors like seeing the body, or flesh, as the seat of evil rather than corrupt intellect. Basically, the virtues of Platonism and the hope of Platonism points to, and is fulfilled by, Christ. Yet, of all the philosophies, Platonism was nearest to Christianity.

Augustine’s Critique of Hellenic Philosophy

In Book IX (Books IX and X contain Augustine’s examination of Hellenic philosophy, as well as parts of Book XIV) Augustine begins his criticism of Stoicism and Aristotelianism (Peripatetic philosophy), with some scattered critiques of Epicureanism and Cynicism too.  Although it is, again, widely known that Augustine was influenced by Stoicism (namely Cicero and Epictetus) and Aristotelianism (through Neoplatonism), this doesn’t stop Augustine from offering criticism of the parts of these philosophies he finds deficient—especially as relating to the human person.  The Platonists and Aristotelians he notes, subject the passions to domination (subjugation) to rationality.  This is not altogether bad, but it is deficient because Augustine’s Christian anthropology does not have mind over matter or reason over passion, but mind equal to matter and reason equal to passion.  (The harmony of logos and eros; “spirit and flesh.”)  But Augustine’s main critique of Stoics deals with their philosophy of the erotic and implicit solitary character (slipping into the sin of pride).

For Augustine, the Stoics—despite their worthiness in other realms—are deeply wrong about the passions.  This is part of the broader voluntarist-intellectualist debate that would reemerge in the Medieval world between the followers of Augustine and the followers of “Thomism” and Scholasticism.  While the Platonists and Aristotelians leave room for the passions (though subjugated to reason), the Stoics hold the most damning view of the passions altogether.  The Stoics view the passions as evil; for it is the passionate man who is the irrational and unwise man.  The task of Stoic virtue was not merely the mastery of the passions (as in Platonism or Aristotelianism) but the elimination of the passions altogether.  As Augustine says, “Others, the Stoics among them, refuse to admit that passions of this kind can conceivably befall a wise man.”  That is, the wise man and virtuous man (which Stoicism aims to create in man) is the man who never has the passions hold sway over him because he has completely eliminated passion from his body.  The good only exists within the soul (rational intellect) in Stoic thought.

The negative view of the body (and erotic) implied in Stoic anthropology is something Augustine cannot accept given his Christianity which holds the body in high regard.  In fact, the body is so sacred and the erotic so sacred in Christianity that this is the real reason for “restrictions” on the body in Christian ethics.  It is not restriction because the body is bad, but boundaries placed on the body for its dignity and sacrality because the body is dignified and sacred; to demean and cheaply abuse and discard the body through libertinism would be reflective of an anthropology that sees the body as little more than an instrument of use.  To have boundaries placed on the body is because the body is sacred and dignified and humans should not cheaply augment, abuse, or “use” their bodies at whim.  (This is the most sophomoric error in understanding Christian anthropology; that Christianity views the body as bad—that was “Christian Manicheanism” and “Christian Gnosticism” but not Catholic Christianity or Orthodox Christianity which actually has the most affirming corporeal anthropology not only in the ancient world but still the most positive corporeal anthropology in the modern world.)

At face value Stoicism and Christianity would seem compatible.  Christianity understands, as Stoicism understands, that the passions can lead to the human doing things (with their body) which is unbefitting of human dignity and virtue.  Stoicism, as Augustine remarks, is the philosophy of spirit (not passion) instead of flesh. (Do take note that in Christian and ancient philosophy, the spiritual was associated with the rational and the fleshly or carnal with the bodily; where Augustine appraises Stoicism as being spiritual he is referring to soulful or rational and not about the passions or erotic which is located in the carnal or fleshly aspect of man.)  But this is where the similarities end and the differences become more manifest.

The lack of dignity and virtue, for Stoicism, is precisely because humans are hamstrung by the passions or erotic in of itself.  The lack of dignity and virtue, for Christianity, is because body and soul are not unified in harmony.  It is not the fault of the passions (or the flesh) for the denigration of the body and virtue in Christian anthropology.  It is the fault of reason for not knowing the reality of the sacredness of the body and passions (and it is here that the Stoics err and even the Platonists and Aristotelians also err; though the Platonist and Aristotelian error is more tolerable than the Stoic error concerning this issue of human anthropology). The Stoics are guilty, from Augustine’s point of view, of taking the fallen state of man as normative and seeing sin as identical with the passions and so the answer to man’s woe is not God but the elimination of the passions altogether. It is a form of works righteousness, a self-righteousness, a self-congratulatory pride in their own power to overcome sin without Divine assistance. The Stoics wish to live, then, according to the flesh, but see themselves superior to the hoi polloi who indulge in their self-gratifying and fleeting passions.

Furthermore, Augustine critiques the Stoic criticism of compassion as a form of weakness (because compassion is sentimentality ergo the passion ruling over the mind). Augustine is not critiquing the Stoic philosophy of sacrifice and acceptance of suffering (something he, and other Christian church fathers, found to be very compatible with Christianity).  However, Augustine charges the Stoics as essentially lacking charity and love with their hyper rationalism.  Man is not purely intellect (as the Stoic philosophy logically implies) but is intellect and passion (as the Platonists and Aristotelians understand despite their privileging of intellect over passion.  Sentimentality is not weakness but man’s great strength; the passions are our humanness in other words.  For Augustine, the role of the passions offer Christians a training in virtue; to directly orient their sentimental passions to the highest good in life (Truth, mercy, and virtue) which the passions aim for but need orienting with from reason.  The anti-passionate and anti-sentimental views offered in Stoicism do not offer, in fitting Augustinian irony, a training in virtue and dignity as the Stoics think but a training in self-righteousness and faux dignity (or incomplete dignity).

Augustine also criticizes Epicureanism (the ancient philosophical school that denied the immortality of the soul, the primacy of reason in the human, and advocated for sensual hedonism or physical pleasure as the Highest Good in life).  Like with Stoicism’s hyper rationalism, Augustine is repulsed by Epicureanism’s hyper carnality.  Where the Stoics erred in seeing man as primarily spiritual (mind or soul), the Epicureans erred in seeing man as solely fleshly or carnal.  Augustine’s anthropological criticism is premised on account of his pluralistic account of man stemming from biblical anthropology: Man is a combination of flesh (body) and spirit (mind), and man’s virtue and dignity comes not in the coerced mastery of the mind over matter but the harmony and unity of flesh and spirit.  Stoic man is deficient because he eliminates his passion; Epicurean man is deficient because he denigrates his body in sensual pursuits; Christian man—the total man (homo totus) for Augustine—orders his passions through his soul and directs it to the Highest Good (God; namely, Truth and Love) and lives in accord with his true nature (flesh and spirit) where body and soul are united as one.  Insofar that Hellenic philosophy failed to understand this, Hellenic philosophy can only show man the truth of Christianity but is not, in of itself, the truth.

Augustine’s foremost interlocutor in the final books of Part I of City of God is the Neoplatonist (and in Augustine’s mind, neo-sophist) Porphyry.  Porphyry was already dead by the time Augustine wrote City of God, but Porphyry was one of the last intellectual critics of Christianity in the world of Late Antiquity.  Christian tradition held that Porphyry was a Christian turned blasphemer, but there is no evidence of Porphyry ever being a Christian.  That said, Porphyry does demonstrate a strong familiarity with Christian (and Jewish) Scripture and ideas in his critique of Christianity (Adversus Christianos).

Porphyry and the Limits of Philosophy

The critique of Porphyry, which is the culmination of the culture critique in the first ten books of City of God, is aimed at Porphyry’s neo-Sophism.  The sophists, in Augustine’s criticism, were philosophers who placed themselves at the center of the world (cf. Protagoras) and, in doing so, lived by the “way of man” instead of the “way of God” and therefore were incapable of coming to know truth because of their pride.  Augustine’s criticism of Porphyry is only understandable from this perspective.  That is, Augustine sees Porphyry as the ultimate hypocrite.  Porphyry claims to be a philosopher, which means he is claiming to be interested in truth and the fundamental nature of reality.  Yet, Porphyry contradicts himself on multiple accounts.  He praises theurgy, then denies it.  In the presence of the mob he speaks to their flattery; in the presence of more learned men he abandons theurgic mysticism.

Porphyry’s story is really one of tragedy from the purview of Augustine’s irony.  As Augustine states, “Porphyry was in subjection to those envious powers, and was at the same time ashamed of his subjection and yet afraid to contradict them openly, he refused to recognize that the Lord Christ is the ‘principle,’ and that by his incarnation we are purified.”  As already mentioned in detailing Augustine’s praise of Platonism, Platonist metaphysics affirmed the reality of Christian metaphysics—this is why many prominent early church fathers were Neoplatonists.  Some went as far as suggesting, like St. Justin Martyr, that the advent of Platonist philosophy in Greece was God’s way of preparing the Greeks for the reception of Christianity.  But rather than follow Platonist philosophy to its fruition—acceptance of Christianity—Porphyry rejects Christianity because of his tragic pride.

At one level Porphyry is a slave to other philosophical and theurgic powers. At another level Porphyry personally benefits by being part of these subjected powers, “You have made yourself the preacher and the angel of those unclean spirits who pretend to be gods of the ether; and they have promised you that those who have been purified in their ‘spiritual’ soul, by theurgic art, although they cannot, indeed, return to the Father, will have their dwelling among the gods of the ether, above the levels of air,” Augustine says to Porphyry.

By being the slave of theurgic mystics and demons, Porphyry is unfree which leads to his contradictory statements.  Among the more learned who reject theurgy he agrees with them.  Among those who believe in theurgic mysticism he is “their preacher.”  Porphyry wants to be the measure of all things like Protagoras, but he is really a subjected little man serving false forces or ignorance (demons).  He is prideful because he is important when he preaches false theurgic teaching.  He is broken in his letters to more esteemed writers and philosophers because he does realize the errors of his ways and wants to seek a more truthful way of living.  However, he is unable to break free of his condition and remains enslaved to those subjected theurgic forces because he serves himself and power rather than others and truth (as he portends himself as doing).

Porphyry is a noble soul in error insofar that he does seek wisdom but fails to recognize the incarnation of Wisdom (who is Christ).  Porphyry instinctively knows, from his teacher Plotinus, that the purification and salvation of man must be universal—that is, available to all—but asserts no philosophy has ever successfully produced such a system.  Augustine argues that Porphyry deliberately keeps himself blind to the fact that the system he is looking for is Christianity, “Now Porphyry says – towards the end of his first book On the Return of the Soul – that no doctrine has yet been established to form the teaching of a philosophical sect, which offers a universal way for the liberation of the soul; no such way has been produced by any philosophy (in the truest sense of the word), or by the moral teaching and disciplines of the Indians, or the magical spells of the Chaldeans, or in any other way, and that this universal way had never been brought to his knowledge in his study of history.  He admits without any doubt that such a way exists, but confesses that it had never come to his notice.”  But, as Augustine goes on to state, Porphyry was alive when that universal way for the liberation of man’s soul and salvation came into the world, “for the liberation of the soul, which is simply the Christian religion,” was revealed in Porphyry’s lifetime.

What can we make of Augustine’s criticism of Porphyry?  At one level Augustine considers the case of Porphyry to be a tragedy.  Here is a philosopher, a learned man, a Platonist, a student of Plotinus, who claims to be seeking wisdom and knowledge, and with that virtue and truth.  Here is a philosopher who is seeking liberation from bondage, the freedom offered by the truth (“the truth shall set you free,” cf. John 8:32).  Here is a philosopher who knows God is necessary for Truth since God is Truth.  Here is a philosopher who, in accepting the Platonist doctrine of principles and emanations, already has a primitive understanding of how the doctrine of the Trinity works in Christianity.  Yet, despite all of this, Porphyry refuses to accept the inevitable and exhaustive logic of his own schooling and searching: Christianity.  Instead of embracing what he seeks he turns away from it.  As such, he becomes a sophist rather than a learned and wise man.  He subjects himself to slavery rather than freedom.  He refuses to accept the incarnate God and embraces the demons as his god.

What prevents Porphyry from accepting the obvious?  Pride.  Porphyry loves himself too much and is also too internally conflicted (to admit the errors of his ways, unlike Augustine who rejected the errors of his youth) to accept the reality that he is not center of the universe.  For if Porphyry accepts Christianity that means he would have to leave behind his life’s work attacking Christianity and admit he was wrong—something he cannot do.  By accepting Christianity, which places Christ—Universal Wisdom and Wisdom incarnate—at the center of the Cosmos, Porphyry would be dethroned from his lofty position as enslaved preacher of theurgic powers.  This is something Porphyry cannot do.

Augustine’s criticism of Porphyry is suddenly a tale we are all familiar with.  The man who considers himself “God’s gift” or the most important person in the world is the man who is truly blind.  Porphyry’s self-centeredness prevents him from seeing the truth that he does, earnestly, seek.  It is rather a sad story when you consider it from Augustine’s point of view; and as we conclude Augustine’s critique of Porphyry (and with it, Hellenic philosophy) we see “Augustinian irony” coming into full bloom.

Augustinian Irony

Like Plato, Augustine’s writings are filled with irony.  I have already touched on Augustine’s irony in the above sections.  Here I would briefly like to summarize Augustinian irony from within his cultural criticism.

Concerning the irony of the Romans, Augustine sees the Romans in noble error.  But this is made even more tragic all things considered.  The Romans want happiness, peace, and virtue, but they glorify a city and empire of poverty, war, and immorality.  The Roman critics of Christianity claim that a return to the old gods will bring back the happy, peaceful, and virtuous times of Rome; Augustine goes to great lengths (by citing predominately pagan Roman authors) that this mythic glory age of Rome never existed under the old gods.  Instead, the Romans are so blind to the reality that Christianity is the religion that offers them happiness, peace, and virtue, and that Christianity is the ultimate religion of the Roman heart.  For it is Christianity’s anthropology which allows for happiness, and it is Christianity’s doctrines and compassion which will lead to peace and virtue.  Furthermore, Christianity’s promotion of patriotism: duty to family, community, and nation, is the fullest embodiment of the patriotism which the Romans claim to praise.  (One of Augustine’s disciples, Orosius, expounded on these themes in his own History Against the Pagans.)

As it relates to the Roman critics of Christianity, Augustine shows how these critics are ignorant of their own history.  The ignorant are often the greatest critics of Christianity.

Concerning the irony of the philosophers, Augustine goes to great lengths to show how the philosophers—noble as their endeavors are—often ends in failure because of incompleteness.  Christianity stands to offer the complete picture, but few want the complete picture (like Porphyry).  This is ironic because the philosophers claim to want to know the whole truth but when encountering the whole truth (offered in Christianity) they balk at it and return to their sophistry because the philosophers don’t want to cease being the centers of the universe.  That is, the philosopher qua philosopher is a philosopher in the pursuit of wisdom.  The philosopher ceases being a philosopher when he has achieved wisdom.  Rather than embrace the contented, happy, and wise life at the end of the tunnel the philosopher retreats into the dark tunnel to continue walking aimlessly because he would rather do that than enjoy the bliss and virtue he claims to want because there is more thrill “in the journey” than at the end of the journey.  The end of philosophy is complete wisdom and virtue; but according to Augustine the philosophers aren’t interested in what they claim to be seeking but are only interested in their inflated egos and the praise given to them “for their discoveries.”

What is Augustinian irony?  Where Platonic irony is tied to Plato’s satire, Augustinian irony is tied to Augustine’s tragedy.  Where Plato saw the sophists as despicable humans deserving to be lampooned, Augustine sees humans as fallen creatures desperately wanting truth and virtue but consistently falling short of their longings.  Augustine’s irony is tragic because he sees the deep yearning in the hearts of the Romans and the Greek philosophers (and even in Porphyry) but how these Romans and philosophers can’t accept the yearning of their heart (in accepting Christianity) and would rather continue their downward descent toward hell.  Augustine’s irony is an irony of tragedy—and this is where his irony differs strongly from Plato’s whose irony was an irony of satire. Augustine’s critique of philosophy is tragic in nature, he sees the hope of philosophy being fulfilled in the wisdom and love of Jesus Christ, the Source of Wisdom and Truth that the philosophers were seeking, but were too proud to acknowledge and see which therefore blinded them (like Porphyry) and destroyed the originally noble pursuit of philosophy. The inability, out of pride, to acknowledge the Truth and Love the philosophers sought made the philosophers tragic figures in Augustine’s eyes.

________________________________________________________________

Paul Krause 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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Existentialism is a misunderstood philosophy. It tends to be the “philosophy” of teenage nihilists, rebellious individualists, and other alienated persons who take a liking to the theme of alienation in existentialist thought. However, existentialism is not a nihilistic philosophy; on the contrary it attempted to confront the crisis of nihilism. Moreover, despite the “individualist” element to it, existentialist individualism (in its Sartrean or Camusian form) is a tragic individualism that does not celebrate the primacy of the individual but laments it. But such individualism often misses the point—Heideggerian authenticity is not a celebration of atomistic individualism either; anyone who has read Being and Time would know Heidegger’s ontic insight of Being-in-the-World means Being-With, a being-in-relationship to world and others.

The Christian roots of existentialism are also well-attested to in scholarship. This has nothing to do with Kierkegaard but everything to do with the Christian anthropological concepts of “The Fall of Man,” “Original Sin,” and Augustinianism. In his short but concise summation of existentialism, William Barrett outlined how existentialism had Christian roots going back to Tertullian and St. Augustine.[1] The reader of Christian theological anthropology will immediately recognize many of the same themes in existentialist thought though in a now “secularized” form: The crisis of love and wanting to love and be loved; alienation from self and from the world the self exists in; trying to find happiness but ending up engaging in domineering behaviorism; seeking rationality because man is a “rational” animal. 

The difference between existentialism—at least in its atheistic form—with Christianity is that it embodies Augustinian tragedy without hope of salvation. To some this is the “grown up” version; that Christianity necessarily leads to tragic existentialism because there is no God to reconcile these dilemmas for us. This was, at least, Heidegger’s understanding of the present moment existentialism sat in. As such, existentialism superficially seems to be “friendly to paganism” because of the pagan fatalism of the heroic hero who struggles against the odds of the world because that is all he is capable of doing.

Therefore, the impetus of existentialism is the recognition that life is defined by some sort of worrying characteristic or characteristics. There is a certain “original guilt” or “anxiety” that looms over our lives which we are, to varying degrees, aware of. Humans have anxiety about themselves, their lives, the world they live in.  They seek to be themselves but fail to be themselves. They seek meaning in a meaningless world. 

Those who get their knowledge of existentialism from Wikipedia receive a deeply misleading and, at times, wrong, understanding of existentialism. It is true that the “authentic self” is a concept sought after in existentialism, with differing understandings of what that means pending the individual existential philosopher: From the rootedness of Heidegger to the pious struggler of Camus to the being-for-itself of Sartre. Moreover, the Augustinian roots of existentialism are best seen in existentialist anthropology emphasizing the primacy of will (voluntarism) and being responsible for the actions they engage in (“sin has consequences” becomes “freedom has consequences”).

As Camus argued, the only question of philosophy is the question of life. Life is the only question philosophy concerns itself with because life is contingent to being; without being there is no life. Without life there is no existence. Without existence there is nothing to ponder since subjectivity is contingent upon existence. Thus, the question of life is the question of being—the same question that Heidegger attempted to answer in Being and Time.

Camus posited the view that we live in a cold, irrational, unordered, unloving, and meaningless world. This facticity was at odds with man’s subjective desires. His desire for goodness, love, rationality, and meaning. The two come into conflict. In essence, it is the rehashed subject-object dialectic of earlier Christian and Romantic philosophy.

Part of the Christian doctrine of the Fall is man’s alienation from the world (represented by his expulsion from Eden), man’s alienation from himself (in rejecting his rationality and favoring his pure desire), man’s alienation from others (represented by Adam’s ruptured relationship with Eve when he blames God for having created Eve who made him eat from the tree), and man’s alienation from God (the source of Truth and happiness). As such, man is alienated in the world.  He seeks the good and true but is unable to live by the good and true. He seeks relationships with others but is alienated from them, often leading to the lust for domination (libido dominandi). He seeks happiness but only makes himself miserable. He does not use his rational soul to conform to the standards of nature but rationalizes his actions to make his “sin” seem acceptable. Man, in essence, does not want responsibility for what he is.

Existentialism plays off of these themes. It accepts, at face value, the alienation of man. It equally asserts that man is at odds with nature (e.g. he seeks meaning and order in an unmeaningful and unorderly world). Man does not seek responsibility for his life because such freedom is burdensome. As such, man is perpetually alienated.

Existentialism, in its many forms, saw this dilemma playing itself out in three ways. The first two were bad. The last “good.” Of the first two roads this alienation leads man down to was either suicide (the coward’s way out) or “bad faith” (refusal to accept reality; the ignorant man’s way out). Nietzsche used the term “Last Man” for the equivalent of the man in bad faith. Hegel called such a person “the victim of history.” The alternative to suicide or bad faith was “authenticity.” 

But what exactly was authenticity? Again, authenticity varies from philosopher to philosopher. What one can say about authenticity is that it lies with coming to terms with the fundamental nature of the world, embracing it for what is, and living by the standard of nature (whoever construed). Only in this way could alienation be confronted, and from this confrontation authentic meaning found.

For Nietzsche this meant the embrace of the eternal struggle for life itself in its quasi-Darwinian battle for evolutionary progression. The Cosmos, for Nietzsche, was a giant battlefield where the struggle for life played itself out. For Camus it was the embrace of the very nature of the absurd; piously accepting the absurd reality of the world and not allowing it to crush you into defeatism. For Sartre it was perpetually choosing to live for yourself rather than for others, since living a life for others cannot reconcile our alienation from others.

Existentialism was the culmination of the anti-nihilist tradition of continental and romantic thought. Existentialism is not, per se, nihilism. Nihilism would represent the “defeat” of the individual in the cold and dark universe we find ourselves in. Nihilism in existentialism is the recognition of a meaningless world but rather than accept this fact as fate, we labor against it in all the manifold ways we can: struggle for life; struggle for freedom; or giving a big middle-finger to the meaningless universe like Camus’ Sisyphus. Moreover, the phenomenon of existentialism as a purely “Western” philosophy is invariably linked to the West’s Christian heritage; the many themes of existentialism are nothing more than temporalized manifestations of themes already found in Christianity. Existentialism straddles the unique position of being metaphysically nihilistic but ontologically meaningful—if you happen to be an existentialist that is. If not then you might just see existentialism as exhausting in nihilism; returning to the very emptiness which it is grounded in.

[1] See William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958).

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Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor of VoegelinView and a writer on art, culture, literature, politics, and religion for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and the forthcoming book Diseases, Disasters, and Political Theory. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and theology (biblical & religious studies) 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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Discourses on Minerva is the personal blog of a pilgrim scholar, journalist, and cultural critic. Here I have more liberty to speak freely on the subjects that matter to us today: Culture, Politics, Religion, and Literature. Visit the About page for more details.

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The Journal of the Eric Voegelin Society Aesthetics Alt-Right America American History American Literature Ancient History Anthropology Aquinas Aristophanes Aristotle Art Augustine Beauty Being and Nothingness Bible Bitcoin Book Reviews Books Byzantine History Capitalism Catholicism Christianity Cicero City of God Civilization Classics Confessions Conservatism Cosmology Cryptocurrency Culture Dante Dante’s Inferno Democracy Dialectic Discourses on Livy Divine Comedy Economics English Literature Enlightenment Epistemology Eros Ethics Existentialism Fascism Feminism Film Freedom French Revolution Geopolitics German Idealism German Philosophy Gothic Great Books Greek Philosophy Greek poetry Hebrew Bible Hegel Hell Herder Hiking Historicism Historiography History Homer Humanism Human Nature Ibn Khaldun Idealism Iliad Islam John Locke Judaism Kant Karl Marx Language Lecture Leo Strauss Leo Tolstoy Liberalism Liberty Literary Tales Literature Love Machiavelli Marxism Materialism Metaphysics Modernity Morality Music Mythology Napoleon Natural Law Nature Nietzsche Nihilism Old Testament Paradise Lost Paul Krause Peloponnesian War Phenomenology of Spirit Philosophy Plato Plato’s Dialogues Platonism Plotinus Poetry Political Philosophy Political Theology Political Theory Politics Postmodernism Progressivism Protestantism Puritanism Reaction Religion Roger Scruton Roman History Romanticism Rome Rousseau Russian Literature Sartre Schelling Schmitt Science Science Fiction Sex Shakespeare Sin Social Contract Socialism Sociology soul Sublime Technology The Odyssey of Love Paul Krause Theology The Republic Thomas Hobbes Thucydides Totalitarianism Truth Tyranny Virtue War War and Peace Writing

Discourses on Minerva is the personal blog of a pilgrim scholar, journalist, and cultural critic. Here I have more liberty to speak freely on the subjects that matter to us today: Culture, Politics, Religion, and Literature. Visit the About page for more details.

November 2025

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