Republics Ancient and Modern, Volume I by Paul A. Rahe

Author:Paul A. Rahe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

Even Augustine was prepared to admit that an individual who embarks “rashly (temere) and without disciplinary order upon the study” of the philosophical underpinnings of Christian theology “will become fussy (curiosus) rather than studious, credulous rather than learned, unbelieving rather than circumspect.”25 In retrospect, one can easily see that Tertullian’s objections were not entirely without substance: in embracing philosophy, the Christian church had welcomed into its confines a Trojan horse.

For the horse, the situation would appear to have been considerably less awkward. Prior to modern times, no philosopher of any great stature ever seriously suggested that the common people might be receptive to philosophical enlightenment.26 In fact, when Plato’s Socrates denied that “the multitude (tò plēthos)” can ever become “devoted to wisdom (phılόsophon)” and insisted that “the many” are by their very nature hostile to the philosophical enterprise, he stated assumptions that would go effectively unchallenged for two thousand years.27 These assumptions had profound implications for the comportment of philosophers within the political community.28 For one must think it both possible and desirable that “the multitude (vulgus) be gradually enlightened (eruditur),” as did Thomas Hobbes, if one is to conclude that, “in order that philosophy might prosper, it ought to be free and subject to coercion neither by fear nor by shame.”29 In antiquity, therefore, and for a long time thereafter, politically astute philosophers were prepared to tolerate popular prejudice, to negotiate a compromise papering over the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” and in some cases even to propagate what Plato had called “noble” or “medicinal lies” and what Quintus Mucius Scaevola and Marcus Terentius Varro later dubbed “civil theology.” Mindful of the fate of Socrates and persuaded that no polity can long survive and prosper if unsupported by a civil religion, they took it for granted that it was both prudent and right that they accommodate themselves in one fashion or another to the needs and superstitions of their unphilosophical neighbors and that they do something with the help of the poets under their influence to reshape those superstitions in such a fashion as to render them less irrational, less conducive to vindictiveness and the persecution of philosophers, and more useful as a support for the political community.30

This fact goes a long way toward explaining why, at least initially, some of the philosophers should find Christianity attractive. When compared with the alternative civil theologies available, that religion appeared to have three not inconsiderable virtues. Its doctrine of Providence and the promise of reward and the threat of punishment in the afterlife rendered Christian theology similar in character to the politically salutary myths propagated by Plato in his Phaedo, Republic, Timaeus, and Laws and made it seem plausible to suppose that it would be particularly effective as an incentive to public-spiritedness. Its otherworldly orientation could arguably serve to moderate the political passions that had so disrupted civic life in the classical period. And, last but not least, Christianity was evidently receptive and, in some measure, even friendly to philosophical influence.

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