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.

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

My Book on Literature: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1725297396

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paul_jkrause/ (@paul_jkrause)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paul_jkrause (@paul_jkrause)

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.

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

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.

________________________________________________________________

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.

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

Venmo Support: https://www.venmo.com/u/Paul-Krause-48

My Book on Literature: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1725297396

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paul_jkrause/ (@paul_jkrause)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paul_jkrause (@paul_jkrause)

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@paul.j.krause

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.

________________________________________________________________

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.

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

Venmo Support: https://www.venmo.com/u/Paul-Krause-48

My Book on Literature: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1725297396

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paul_jkrause/ (@paul_jkrause)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paul_jkrause (@paul_jkrause)

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@paul.j.krause

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.

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

Venmo Support: https://www.venmo.com/u/Paul-Krause-48

My Book on Literature: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1725297396

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paul_jkrause/ (@paul_jkrause)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paul_jkrause (@paul_jkrause)

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@paul.j.krause

Skip to content

Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading

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

« Oct     America American History Anthropology Art Augustine Bible Book Reviews Books Catholicism Christianity Classics Economics English Literature Enlightenment Epistemology Ethics German Philosophy Great Books Greek Philosophy Greek poetry Hegel History Human Nature Lecture Liberalism Literary Tales Literature Love Modernity Philosophy Plato Poetry Political Philosophy Political Theory Politics Religion Romanticism Science Theology War

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).

________________________________________________________________

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.

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

Skip to content

Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading

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

« Oct     America American History Anthropology Art Augustine Bible Book Reviews Books Catholicism Christianity Classics Economics English Literature Enlightenment Epistemology Ethics German Philosophy Great Books Greek Philosophy Greek poetry Hegel History Human Nature Lecture Liberalism Literary Tales Literature Love Modernity Philosophy Plato Poetry Political Philosophy Political Theory Politics Religion Romanticism Science Theology War

Skip to content

Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading

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

« Oct     America American History Anthropology Art Augustine Bible Book Reviews Books Catholicism Christianity Classics Economics English Literature Enlightenment Epistemology Ethics German Philosophy Great Books Greek Philosophy Greek poetry Hegel History Human Nature Lecture Liberalism Literary Tales Literature Love Modernity Philosophy Plato Poetry Political Philosophy Political Theory Politics Religion Romanticism Science Theology War

Skip to content

The oldest written account of the Greek deities is from Hesiod. His Theogony, literally “birth of the gods,” charts out the genealogies of the major and minor deities in two branches. The first set of gods come into existence without sex. The second set of gods come into existence with sex; often very graphic and violent sex and they continue to have violent sex after their birth. From Gaia and Uranus, the titans, furies, and future Olympians were conceived from the “wide” bosom of the two primordial deities from which Cronus was conceived in ambition, hatred, and lust.

Aphrodite, Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Hades, Ares, and the rest of the Olympian deities come from this second line of gods birthed from the castrated genitals of Uranus which fell into Thalassa’s open womb, the primordial goddess of the sea. Swishing and swirling about, Uranus’ castrated phallus impregnated Thalassa and out popped Aphrodite. The blood which spilled out onto Gaia’s fertile body gave rise to the giants and other creatures. Beyond hatred and patricide, murder is also a recurring theme in Hesiod’s story. Hercules slays Geryon and Hydra; Bellerophon kills the Chimera bore by Hydra.

Yet, it is the brutality of the gods which is most glaring to the reader of Hesiod’s classic. Rebellion and war run riot through the rise and fall of the gods. Cronus and the titans challenged their parents; then Zeus and the Olympians challenged and overthrew the titans:

They clashed with a great war cry.No longer did Zeus restrain his might but straightawayhis heart filled with might, and he showed allhis brute force. From [Uranus] and Olympus togetherhe came striding, flashing lightning constantly. His boltswere flying in close array with thunder and flashfrom his sturdy hands, whirling the flamethickly. Life-bearing Gaia screamed as she burned, andthe immense forest crackled loudly all round.All the earth was boiling as well as the streams of [Uranus]and the unplowed sea. Hot blasts encompassedthe nether Titans, and immense flame reachedthe shining aether. Although the Titans were stalwart,the gleaming light of the lightning and flash deprived

them of their eyes. Ineffable heat gripped Chawos (686-700).

As Hesiod continues to describe the birth and death of the gods and great monsters of antiquity, the chaining of Prometheus to his eternal torment is described. So too is Hades’ rape of Persephone. Battle is depicted left and right, and “a terrible din arose from their dreadful wrath, and the work of power was revealed” (709-710). Lust, sex, and war reign supreme in Hesiod’s telling of the birth of the gods. Moreover, it is from this brutality and carnality that Hesiod gives them praise—only those with enough cunning and ambition are worthy of having the praise of the muses.

That the gods birthed through sexual lust are themselves lustful was not missed by Christian readers of the pagan stories. Though St. Augustine received the Romanized version of the Greek myths, he goes to great lengths and laborious pains—using the pagans’ own texts—to highlight the moral depravity of the gods in Confessions and City of God. If imitation of the gods is what leads to virtuous character, then any rational person would have to conclude that you could never attain virtue imitating these gods who are filled with bloodthirst, lust, and depravity. “Have I not read in you of Jupiter,” Augustine rhetorically poses, “at once both thunderer and adulterer? Of course the two activities cannot be combined, but he was so described as to give an example of real adultery defended by the authority of a fictitious thunderclap acting as a go-between” (Confessions, i.xvi.25).

Augustine’s description of the chaotic sea as an image for sin is apt in the description of the Greek gods. It is in the cesspool of chaotic lusts that the entire generation of the future Olympians sprang forth from. And that their birth coincides with primordial acts of violence and lust was never lost to Augustine and other readers.

Hesiod’s account of the birth of the gods is a triumph of the depraved imagination. It is ripe with sexual images and metaphors as well as violence. Though, in many ways, primitive at least in comparison to the more developed stories of the gods and their skullduggery that came after Hesiod, his graphic imagination of the birth of the gods cannot be missed by any reader and reveals the reality of the birth and character of the pagan gods as opposed to observing some of the more mild paintings by Titian or Peter Paul Rubens.

Divine Domination: The “Providence” and “Judgement” of the Gods

A more mature, or fuller, portrait of the gods is given to us by Homer and the post-Theogony poets and playwrights. These more developed stories, like the Homeric Hymns, in giving greater detail to the ancient acts of lustful violence, make the depravity of the gods clear to the readers and listeners. The Hymn to Demeter, in describing Persephone’s abduction and rape by Hades, makes the cries of Persephone piercing to the audience, “And [Hadês], heading for the misty realms of darkness, seized her as he drove his chariot and as she screamed out loud” (79-80). But Persephone is not guiltless in her seizure by Hades; it was her narcissism—her intoxication with her own beauty—which opened the underworld’s door to the living whereby Hades snatched and brutalized her until forced to surrender her back to the realm of the living.

Homer’s Iliad (and Odyssey) gives a fuller portrait of the vindictive gods of Olympus and their providence and judgement over mankind; as does the anthology by Pseudo-Apollodorus. Paris’ crime of abducting Helen away from Menelaus is unforgiveable. His charming of the virginal naivety of Helen is far from the tale reimagined and presented in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy. Helen was not in love with Paris, but Paris wanted to control Helen for himself and so abducted her.

The story of the destruction of Troy is not a mere human tale. What set the stage in motion was the Judgement of Paris. In their vanity, and vanity runs replete through the Greek stories, the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite appear before Paris whom he shall judge as being the most beautiful among the gods. Paris chooses Aphrodite, the very goddess who exploded forth from the Thalassa’s womb in Hesiod’s Theogony. Feeling spited, Hera and Athena plot to bring down Paris. Helen gets caught up in this divine judgement because Aphrodite promised her to Paris after Paris chose her as the most beautiful among the divines.

Troy lost the providential blessing not because of the sinful acts of Paris, though sinful they were, but because of the retributive jealousy of Athena and Hera who wanted to punish both Aphrodite and Paris. At least this is the case in Homer’s account. But to absolve the gods of such jealousy, later writers took to establishing divine prophecy for the war; Pseudo-Apollodorus takes this approach in explaining why Paris could elope with Helen so that Zeus will be satisfied.

The Judgement of Paris is also the abdication of moral responsibility from the gods. Pseudo-Apollodorus, giving even greater detail of the backstory of the gods, equally unmasks the vanity of the Olympians. In celebrating the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, since the Olympian gods are obsessed with sex and violent procreation, the banquet held on Mount Olympus was attended by all gods except Eris. Eris was the god of strife and strife was something to be avoided on this joyous occasion. There is much irony in this since all the gods are jealous and strife-filled spirits.

If strife was to be avoided none of the gods should have been present. But feeling spurned, Eris threw the Apple of Discord which gave rise to the arguments between the three goddesses who went to Zeus to settle the dispute. Zeus, in his “wisdom,” knew that his choice as judge would bring him scorn by the other two so he elected Paris to be the judge and in doing so sealed his fate and the fate of the Trojans because of his cowardice. The thousands who died in the war, the burning of the city, and the brutal slaying of Astyanax, is all at the feet of the Olympian gods through their abdication of responsibility and petty quarrelling with one another.

Providential blessing is equally tied to providential judgement. Feeding the narcissism of the gods and goddesses secures the providence of the deities to whom the libations are poured out to—in the case of Paris, whom he chose as the most beautiful. Aphrodite fights for her lover and her lover’s countrymen. But such blessing is not a guaranteed thing. In feeding the vanity of certain gods this choosing of certain gods over others earns the hatred of spurned gods. In having their self-importance spurned, Athena and Hera conspire against Aphrodite—not just Paris—by assailing Paris and using the Greeks as their force of judgement to wound Aphrodite by having Paris killed. The want for revenge against Aphrodite touches Paris as the human instrument of the goddess’ desire for revenge. What better revenge than hitting two birds with one stone? The Greeks had the providential blessing of the gods because they were the instrument of judgement against Aphrodite and the Trojans.

When Plato called humans the mere puppets of the gods, he was doing something incredible. Like the playwrights before him, Plato was guilty of sacrilege in challenging the pettiness of the Olympian gods. In setting up the images as the puppets of these vengeful gods, Plato showed the slavery which mankind labored under while under the eyes of the Olympians. If the gods have a perfect relationship with justice, wisdom, courage, moderation, and beauty, then it doesn’t do them much good as they constantly engage in thievery, trickery, and vanity. The Forms, for Plato, are superior to the gods because the Forms don’t suffer from the pettiness of the gods.

Amid the Trojan War, Zeus deceives Agamemnon with a false dream. Taking the dream as prophetic foreshadowing of his victory and divine blessing, Agamemnon leads the Greeks into a disastrous battle which nearly costs them the war. Deceit is all too common among the gods. Indeed, they use deceit to their petty advantages. During the Judgement of Paris, as contained by Pseudo-Apollodorus, each of the three goddesses try to bribe Paris to choose them as the most beautiful. Hera promised Paris a kingdom over all men, Athena promised victory in war, and Aphrodite promised him Helen.

The promises of Athena and Hera were hollow because Pseudo-Apollodorus had previously stated that it was the will of Zeus to be satisfied and that meant Troy had to be destroyed. Assuming the reality of free-will, which is denied in the pagan anthropologies, Athena and Hera were offering up lies just so Paris might choose them. They would have subsequently reneged had Paris chosen them for Zeus’ divine will to still take place. The post-Homeric writings, in trying to absolve the gods from their baseness, make them even more barbarous.

It is clear, as Augustine knew, that the pagan deities were conceptualized to sanction the depraved actions of their followers. If Zeus was a serial rapist, and he was, then his power to force himself onto the goddesses of his choosing—and mortals as well—would have to be accepted because of his divine authority. So, the figure of Zeus is in the place of depraved human authority in Augustine’s mind. As Augustine says about Jupiter, the Roman equivalent of Zeus:

But whoever have pretended as to Jupiter’s rape of Ganymede, a very beautiful boy, that king Tantalus committed the crime, and the fable ascribed to Jupiter; or as to his impregnating Danae as a golden shower, that it means that the women’s virtue was corrupted by gold: whether these things were really done or only fabled in those days, or were really done by others and falsely ascribed to Jupiter, it is impossible to tell how much wickedness must have been taken for granted in men’s hearts that they should be thought able to listen to such lies with patience (City of God, xviii.13).

The interplay and inconsistency of divine favor has nothing to do with promises or piety but everything with who has power. The dynamics of divine jealousy and wrath along with providence and blessing is given to the human forces which have more power over the other. So, as Augustine also noted, temples set up as sanctuaries for the gods became the altars of murder and slavery.

Athena and Hera defeated Aphrodite because Troy was defeated. The splitting of the Olympian gods into Greek and Trojan factions had nothing to do with the pieties and libations of the two sides—if anything, Homer certainly casts the Trojans in a much more pious and sympathetic light than the Greeks. Hector is the model of piety and self-sacrifice as is Aeneas. In one of the most touching scenes in the epic, Hector unveils himself to his crying son to comfort him in such an intimately human moment. Hector then proceeds to ask the gods blessing and hedge of protection against his young son. But all was for not as when the Greeks stormed the city. Andromache was brutalized and Astyanax snatched from her arms and thrown off the city walls to his death.

There is a further despicable irony advanced in Homer’s depiction of Hera. Hera is the goddess of marriage and family, but she does nothing to protect marriages and families throughout the Iliad. The Greeks and Trojans share the same gods; the most faithful family, Hector, Andromache, and Astyanax, are altogether abandoned by Hera. The goddess of families and marriages gleefully allows for the butchering of families and the destruction of families just to satisfy her ravenous pursuit of revenge.

Virgil’s turning of Homer’s gods on their heads has nothing to do so much with the piety of Hector and Aeneas, though he certainly presents “pious Aeneas” in the same pious light as Hector, but everything to do with the realities of power between the earthly cities. When Homer wrote his epic, Greece was on the ascendency and had Ionian colonies. When the most venerable poet of the Latin tongue wrote his epic, Rome was on the ascendency. Additionally, Greece had been vanquished under Roman might. Aeneas slayed Turnus, the personified character of Greece in Virgil’s epic, thus foretelling Greece’s demise just as Dido’s death and cursing of Aeneas and his children as she thrust Aeneas’ blade into her breast gave the mythopoetic justification of the Punic Wars and Carthage’s defeat in those conflicts. There is a great literary genius to Virgil in both instances; Dido killed herself with Aeneas’ blade, and the blade of Aeneas which she used to kill herself is representative of the Roman blade that would destroy the great harlot city of the Mediterranean. That she died in a burning pyre was also meant to foreshadow the burning of Carthage after the city’s defeat. In slaying Turnus, whose genealogy linked him back to the Greeks, Virgil provides the mythopoetic justification for how it was the deities who sided with Troy had divine sanction all along.

Where Virgil plays more explicitly with the providential blessings of the gods based on the zeitgeist of earthly power, Homer’s gods are still shackled to this reality. Hera announces that her love for Argos, Mycenae, and Sparta—nothing more than a reflection of the three most powerful Greek city-states at the time—will lead them to be the instruments of judgement against Troy. Hera’s love for those three cities simply reflected the reality of those cities being powerful in the timeline of Homer’s Greece.

The many Greek accounts of the gods and the origins of the Trojan War do not absolve the gods but show the contradictions that the Greeks had to wrestle with in their stories of their gods. Homer’s story is tragic but realistic; he depicts the gods in their fits of jealousy and rage every bit as human as the domineering humans of late Bronze Age civilization. But the Olympian gods are so clearly immoral, because men are lustful creatures seeking domination, that later developments of their backstory and Greek history is chalked up to divine prophecy which humans could not alter. Divine jealousy and vanity are glossed over by prophecy. In either case, humans were still the puppets of the immoral and vindictive gods.

Augustine’s Critique of the Pagan Pantheon

The most forceful critic of the pagan gods was Augustine of Hippo. In Confessions and City of God, Augustine launches into longwinded and breathtaking criticisms of the pagan deities which are rightfully acknowledged by many as the first systematic attempts at cultural criticism in the Western canon. He shook their foundations in exposing the hypocrisy and the limits of the pagan gods and their apologists.

The shallowness of the pagan critics of Christianity is well-known since Augustine exposes their hollowness for all to see. It was the educated pagan elite which had refused to convert to Christianity which then launched into their criticism that Christianity’s ascendency had caused the pagan gods to abandon Rome. But while a schoolboy, Augustine reflected on how the educated elite would readily acknowledge the falsity of their own mythological stories (cf. Confessions, i.xiii.22). Augustine’s highlighting of the immorality of the gods and their refusal to have helped their followers out in other times is equally damning. The pagan critics of Christianity were not only liars when it suited them—just like their gods—but they were ignorant of their own history.

Augustine, in the first ten books of City of God, plays by the rules of the pagans. He constantly cites from their histories and their poetry to show the depravity of their gods and how they had never protected their cities and peoples in the first place. As hitherto highlighted, Augustine saw through the façade of the “old gods” who were anthropomorphized justifications of power, lust, and sexual deviancy which brought extensive harm onto those who fell under that lust for domination (women and young boys especially).

The pagan gods were born from patricide and rebellion. They were born from primordial acts of sexual violence. Their patronage was in the civitas terrena which cared only to advance its depraved lust to control; to control everything as possible in the world. That the pagan gods were born in the same imagery of sin and the lust to dominate never escaped Augustine’s insightful eyes and criticism.

Throughout Augustine’s writings it is sexual depravity and other carnal desires which bear down on men and harm women most especially—like with the rape of Lucretia and the Sabine women. The sea is constantly used as an image of unformed man lost in the chaotic waves of his desire without God’s grace. We have in Hesiod’s account of the birth of the gods sexual violence in Cronus cutting the genitals of his Uranus off and casting them into the sea where from the sea’s bosom bursts forth Aphrodite like a child out of the womb. The beauty contests that capture the lustful heart of Zeus and caused the Trojan War is the same falling for carnal beauty detached from the parentage of the Transcendent which the “Sons of God” fell captive to in Genesis.

Rebellion, patricide, and even fratricide, are also contained in the stories of the Greek poets and tragedians; that they occur among the host of divines should be the most worrying of signs about the inability of any moral law being possible if trying to imitate gods whose very existence is predicated on the lust for domination. In his encounters with the pagan apologists who gave license to this sacralized libido dominandi, “Astrologers try to destroy [God’s] saving doctrine when they say: ‘The reason for your sinning is determined by the heaven,’ and ‘Venus or Saturn or Mars was responsible for this act.’ They make a man not in the least responsible for his faults” (Confessions, iv.iii.4). Imitation of the gods or proscribing such immorality to the will of the gods prevents any moral law from forming in the hearts of the devotees of the pagan gods.

Those who opine the loss of the pagan gods are, like the pagans in Augustine’s time, the most ignorant, shallow, and illiterate among us. We are better off without the pagan gods; unless one wants to return to that world of bloodlust and open violence. But we still have their stories and what to do with them has always been one of Christianity’s greatest cultural triumphs.

Christianity’s baptism of these stories, either in showing the vanity and depravity of the gods as an honest reflection of man’s fallenness and therefore pointing to the necessity of Christ, or in extracting out the more noble of actions of the Homeric heroes—like Hector’s filial fidelity and piety in the most universal sense—serve as the only possible redemption of these stories which are otherwise filled with lust, sex, and war. The self-sacrifice to defend family and fatherland from the Christian perspective is exalted precisely because it doesn’t indulge in the fantasy of bloodlust and the license to dominate which brings only misery, suffering, and tragedy to others but is motivated by the true love which has no greater end than to lay down one’s life for their beloved. Thus, it was Hector (rather than Achilles) who was memorialized in Christianity. However, any reader of the pagan tragedies and epics should not be numb to the suffering and bloodshed rampant in a culture which had become captive by the lust for domination. The ancient city was a barren, bloody, and desolate place. What replaced it was light, truth, and wisdom. The loss of light, truth, and wisdom only returns us to something barren, bloody, and desolate.

*This essay is adapted from my column at The Imaginative Conservative, “Lust, Sex, and War: On the Depravity of the Pagan Gods” (20 March 2019)

________________________________________________________________

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.

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

My Book on Literature: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1725297396

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paul_jkrause/ (@paul_jkrause)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paul_jkrause (@paul_jkrause)