St. Paul was the second and arguably most important founder of Christianity. In a characteristic turn of phrase, he called himself “a Hebrew of Hebrews” and was trained in the tradition of Pharisaic oral law. Yet Paul quotes the Hebrew scriptures in Greek translation and he was even a Roman citizen, which was remarkable for a Jew at that time. Furthermore, it is through Paul's extraordinarily itinerant activism that Christianity developed from a local cult that originated in the villages of Palestine to a religion that became established in the most important cities of the ancient world.
Some, perhaps many, professional philosophers might dispute the claim to understand Paul as a philosopher. True, Paul was no lover of philosophy and he thought (like many present-day evangelical Christians) that he was living in the last days of the end of history. Happily for us, he was mistaken. However that may be, it is difficult to think of a Western thinker whose concepts have had a greater influence, an influence that is still felt in modern philosophy as either repulsion (Nietzsche) or attraction (Kierkegaard).
The logic of Paul's language is deeply antithetical, what Luther calls “a delicious language … an unheard-of speech which human reason simply cannot understand.” Nowhere is this truer than when Paul writes about death. Sin came into the world through the action of one man, Adam, and with sin comes death. For Paul, sin and death go out of the world through the action of another man, Christ, the second Adam, who dies for our sins. As Paul puts it in Romans:
Then as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man's act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men.
It is Christ's death in the crucifixion that puts an end to sin and death in order that we may live, that we may be born again. Paul says of Christ:
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
Therefore, what dies on the cross is not just Christ the God-man, but our former sinful, death-bound existence. Through the identification with the passion of the Christ, Christians die to their selves in order to be born into eternal life. Thus, to put the central paradox of Christianity at its most stark, Christ puts death to death and in dying for our sins we are reborn into life. To be a Christian, then, is to think of nothing else but death, for it is only through a meditation on mortality that the path to salvation might be sought. In which case, and this is the question that Kierkegaard will ask eighteen centuries later: how many so-called Christians are really Christian?
The “actual” life of Paul is recorded in Acts of the Apostles, traditionally thought to have been written by the same author as Luke's Gospel. However, Acts does not give an account of Paul's death, but instead ends with him languishing for two years in Rome, under house arrest. However, Paul was still apparently free to write and preach the Gospel, and Acts ends with the words “boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Paul had wound up in Rome after having been imprisoned for two years in Casaerea in Palestine for giving an unsuccessful speech in Aramaic where a mob tried to kill him. Because he was a Roman citizen, he had the right to trial in Rome, which accounts for his final journey in which he takes the Gospel to the very heart of the Empire.
According to Eusebius in The History of the Church, Paul met a grisly death under the orders of Nero (who is now responsible for three deaths in this book): “It is recorded that in his reign Paul was beheaded in Rome itself.” The traditional tale is that Paul was interred in the catacombs and that some centuries later the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls was built over the site of his sarcophagus. Are we to believe such tales of martyrdom? According to Voltaire, “We can only guffaw at all the humbug we are told about martyrs.” However, one should never underestimate the power of humbuggery.
In Against the Christians, the pagan Porphyry expresses his exasperated admiration for the Christian Origen as “the most distinguished philosopher of our time.” St. Gregory of Nyssa calls him “The Prince of Philosophers,” and for St. Jerome he was the greatest teacher in the early Christian church. Like Plotinus, Origen was a pupil of the philosopher Ammonius, but unlike Plotinus, he was led to clarify Christian doctrine and provide the most detailed textual criticism of the Old and New Testaments.
Many stories are told about Origen's extraordinary chastity. In the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Christ says,
For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.
Unfortunately, Origen seems to have interpreted these words literally, and when he was teaching in Alexandria he castrated himself in order to work freely with female students of Christian doctrine. Although the courage required to perform this act makes cowards of us all, Origen's faith was so strong that he was certainly able to “receive it.” Eusebius euphemistically describes Origen's self-castration as “a headstrong act.” It prevented him from being ordained and he was never canonized. In Deuteronomy it is written,
No man whose testicles have been crushed or whose organ has been removed shall become a member of the assembly of the Lord.
Origen met his death in a particularly gruesome manner. After Decius became emperor in 249, he began his brief reign with widespread persecution of Christians. As Eusebius relates in his extended biographical account, terrible sufferings befell Origen:
Chains and bodily torments, agony in iron and the darkness of his prison; how for days on end his legs were pulled four paces apart in the torturer's stocks.
Origen apparently faced these horrors with courage before he eventually expired.
Bishop Athanasius’ elegantly recounted Life of Antony is the founding text of Christian monasticism. “Monachos” in Greek means “living alone” and the monastic life meant withdrawal from the world, chastity, constant prayer and manual labour. For Antony, this withdrawal meant long years spent deep in the arid mountains of the Egyptian desert.
The Life of Antony became an immediate best-seller and exerted enormous influence from Augustine to Luther and beyond. It became the model for hagiography. My reason for including Antony is to show the self-conscious connection between the death of the Christian saint and that of the philosopher, exemplified by Socrates. What Antony represents, in my view, is the Christianization of the philosophical death through which “the lives of the philosophers” become “the lives of the saints.”
There are many striking parallels between Antony and Socrates: rejecting normal values, both of them live a life of personal austerity and intellectual humility. But this humility is combined with devastating perceptiveness. On one occasion, two pagan philosophers came to visit Antony out of curiosity. Antony asked them why these wise men wanted to speak to someone as stupid as himself. To which the philosophers courteously replied that Antony was not stupid but exceedingly wise. Antony then immediately made the following inference:
If you have come to see a stupid man, your effort is wasted; but if you think that I am wise and possess wisdom, it would be a good idea to imitate what you approve of, for it is right to imitate good things. If I had come to you, I would imitate you, but since you have come to me in the belief that I am wise, you should be Christians like me.
The pagan philosophers departed, amazed at Antony's mental agility. On another occasion, a group of old men came to visit Antony for counsel and he decided to test them by asking about the meaning of a passage of Scripture. Each man gave his opinion until the last was asked and he said simply, “I do not know.” Like Socrates, Antony said this was the only true answer.
With Antony, the death of the Christian saint takes over and transforms the “art of dying” or ars moriendi of the pagan philosopher. Antony knew when he was going to die and insisted to his followers that he did not want his body embalmed and mummified in the Egyptian fashion. He asked for a simple earth burial and bequeathed his worn tunic and old sheepskin rug to Athanasius, his biographer. When he had finished speaking, “he stretched his feet out a little and looked upon death with joy.”
The sublime simplicity of Antony's death can be compared with the death of St. Benedict in Gregory the Great's hagiography from the late sixth century. Benedict predicts the day of his death, surrounds himself with his disciples, his body too weak to stand without support. In Gregory's words, he “arms himself” for death by “partaking of the Lord's body and blood.” Spiritually nourished, his hands raised up to heaven, he breathes his last in the middle of a prayer.
It is important, I think, in cultures like our own where Christianity has become so trivialized, to remind oneself of this considerably more rigorous and demanding Christian attitude towards death. In this regard, the sayings of the Desert Fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries are absolutely fascinating. Evagrius, a follower of Origen, says,
Always keep your death in mind and do not forget the eternal judgment, then there will be no fault in your soul.
John the Dwarf says,
Renounce everything material and that which is of the flesh. Do your work in peace. Persevere in keeping vigil, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness, and in sufferings. Shut yourself in a tomb as though you were already dead, so that at all times you will think death is near.
The Christian attitude to death can also lead to what sounds like cold callousness to modern ears. There is a story told of Cassian from the early fifth century, where he is reported as saying:
There was a monk living in a cave in the desert. His relations according to the flesh let him know, “Your father is very ill, at the point of death: come and receive his inheritance.” He replied to them, “I died to the world before he did and the dead do not inherit from the living.”
As we saw with St. Paul, to be Christian is to die to the self and the world in order to be born again. From the worldly, fleshly point of view, the true Christian is already dead and therefore relations with one's family members have no importance. But we are going to see such Christian austerity interestingly compromised in the next two entries.
One the most brilliant and influential of the Church Fathers, Gregory left an extraordinarily tender piece of writing on the life and death of St. Macrina, his sister. He visits her convent, where she is already terribly afflicted. In plain and subtle detail, Gregory recounts her last days and hours. Her final prayer displays the severity of the Christian attitude to death:
Thou, O Lord, hast freed us from the fear of death. Thou hast made the end of life the beginning to us of true life. Thou for a season restest our bodies in sleep and awakest them again at the last trump.
Therefore, one should not fear death, as it is not the end but the beginning of the true life that will reach fruition with the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead. Gregory witnessed Macrina's death and described it in a language at once hagiographic and personal:
Meanwhile evening had come and a lamp was brought in. All at once she opened the orb of her eyes and looked towards the light, clearly wanting to repeat the thanksgiving sung at the Lighting of the Lamps. But her voice failed and she fulfilled her intention in the heart and by moving her hands, while her lips stirred in sympathy with her inward desire. But when she had finished the thanksgiving, and her hand brought to her face to make the Sign had signified the end of the prayer, she drew a deep breath and closed her life and her prayer together.
Gregory's account of the death of his sister finds an even more powerful echo in Augustine's famous description of the death of his mother, Santa Monica, at the end of Book 9 of the Confessions.
Monica's final wish was to see her son converted to Christianity, and when this had taken place in the manner that Augustine dramatically describes in Book 8 of the Confessions, she asks, “What am I doing here?” Monica falls into a fever and when it is clear that she is dying, Augustine's brother asks her—in a vain offer of comfort—if she minds being so far from home, in Ostia near Rome rather than back in Tha-gaste, in modern Algeria. She replies,
Nothing is far from God. I need not fear that he will not know where to raise me up at the end of the world.
Like others we have seen in this book, Monica expresses no concern for the care of her corpse—”put this body anywhere”—and only asks to be “remembered at the altar of the Lord.”
Yet, Augustine is not assuaged by his mother's final words and falls into deep grief. He asks himself, in a characteristically self-lacerating question, revealing a subjective depth arguably never seen prior to Augustine and only rarely equalled since, for example in Rousseau,
What was it, therefore, that grieved me so heavily, if not the fresh wound wrought by the sudden rupture of our most sweet and dear way of life together?
He goes on to say that his heart was “ripped asunder” by his mother's death, “for out of her life and mine one life had been made.” Augustine feels as if his individuality has been divided by his mother's death. He feels as if part of his self is missing or, indeed, already dead, and this pains him immeasurably. Augustine has already grieved for the death of his dear, but unnamed, friend in Book 4 of the Confessions. He writes that his heart was “made dark by sorrow, and whatever I looked upon was death.” In his wretchedness, Augustine makes the following astonishing remark,
Well has someone said of his friend that he is half of his soul. For I thought that my soul and his soul were but one soul in two bodies.
Augustine sees his soul as sundered and his life as a half-life. Interestingly, this is also the reason why Augustine fears death: if he dies then the friend whom he loved so much would also wholly die. Love half-alive is still better than love fully dead. Yet, the profound grief in Book 4 of the Confessions is that of a pagan. The issue becomes radically different after his conversion to Christianity. The pain that Augustine feels over his mother's death is a double pain, for he also feels guilt for the depth of his grief. Why? Because it shows how far he is still in the grip of human feelings and not sufficiently attached to God. He writes, in an extraordinary sentence:
I sorrowed under my sorrow with an added sorrow, and I was torn by a twofold sadness.
His sorrow for his mother becomes twofold at the sorrow he feels for not dying to his self and living in Christ. This is a fascinating moment, for although Augustine knows that his mother will live eternally through Christ, he cannot assuage his grief. This is why he feels guilt and an existential need to open himself up further in an act of confession to God:
Now, Lord, I confess to you in writing. Let him read it who wants to, let him interpret it as he wants. If he finds sin in it, that I wept for my mother for a small part of an hour, for that mother now dead to my eyes who for so many years had wept for me so that I might live in your eyes, let him not laugh me to scorn. But rather, if he is a man of large charity, let him weep over my sins before you, the Father of all brothers of your Christ.
It must sound mystifying to the eggshell egos and their easy tears that populate so much contemporary popular culture that Augustine should feel shame for weeping “a small part of an hour” over his mother's death. But this has to be explained in Christian terms: he feels grief because of the fact of sin that still corrodes Augustine's nature and makes him imperfect.
To say it once again, it is not easy being Christian. The properly Christian attitude to death is revealed in Augustine's reaction to the seemingly tragic death of his son, Adeo-datus, at the age of seventeen. Augustine confesses that his son was “born of me in the flesh out of my sin” through his first wife. But Augustine is able to look on his death with peace of mind because he and his son had been baptized together a couple of years earlier: “Anxiety over our past life fled away from us.”
The Life of St. Augustine was written by Bishop Possidius thirty years after his death. Augustine fell ill with a terrible fever during the fourteen-month siege and blockade of Hippo by “a mixed group of savage Vandals and Alans, together with a Gothic tribe and people of different races.” When asked by Honoratus whether or not bishops and clergy should withdraw from the Church in the face of an enemy, Augustine wrote a long and withering rebuke, arguing that it was the obligation of the clergy to stay with their flock and not hand them over to the pagan “wolf.”
Augustine died at the age of seventy-six, having served as bishop or priest in Hippo, in modern Algeria, for forty years. As he was dying, he requested solitude and seclusion. Augustine had the psalms of David copied and he read them “with copious and continual weeping.” He left no will, because as a poor man he had nothing to leave.
Boethius, traditionally known as the last of the Romans and the first of the Medieval Scholastics, was a hugely important philosopher, as it was through his translations that Aristotle's logical works survived in the West. Boethius planned to translate all of Plato's and Aristotle's work into Latin, a project brought to an end by his violent death while he was still in his forties. The Consolation of Philosophy was one of the most important books in the Middle Ages and beyond, existing in hundreds of manuscript copies. Sometime later, in 1593, an elderly Elizabeth I translated the Consolation, allegedly in twenty-four (some say twenty-seven) hours.
Like Cicero and Seneca before him, Boethius was a very important political figure. He gained the confidence of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, who governed Italy and much of the Western Roman Empire after the capital had been moved to Constantinople. By the age of thirty, Boethius became magister officiorum, head of civil and military affairs, who controlled access to the king. The details of his rapid fall from power are not clear, but it seems that he was implicated in a plot to undermine Theodoric. The senate at the time was little more than the plaything of the king, and Boethius was arrested, condemned to death and sent into exile to await execution. It was in this period of anxious waiting that Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy.
When reading Consolation, it should not be forgotten that this is a book written by a man who believes himself unjustly condemned to death. It is in a prison cell, then, that Philos-ophia appears, personified as a woman and offering consolation. And what a woman she is: “Sometimes,” Boethius writes,
she was of average human size, while at other times she seemed to touch the very sky with the top of her head.
Boethius is full of righteous indignation and he says to Philosophia,
And now you see the outcome of my innocence—instead of reward to true goodness, punishment for a crime I did not commit.
The form of the book is a dialogue between Boethius and Philosophia about the nature of happiness. And herein lies the main riddle of the text: Boethius is ostensibly a Christian in an empire that was by that time fully Christianized, yet Christ is never so much as mentioned. Indeed, the conception of philosophy offered by the fifty-foot woman is highly Platonic. This is most obviously the case with the endorsement of Plato's conception of creation where eternal matter is formed by the hands of the demiurge or craftsman of the world, as opposed to the Judaeo-Christian God who creates the universe out of nothing. Philosophia also claims that happiness, goodness and God are identical and that we can participate in them not through the mediation of Christ, but much more Platonically by turning our intellect towards the emanations from their substance.
What consolation does philosophy offer to the man condemned to death? The book finishes with a distinction between human and divine judgement. Although human judgement, in the case of Theodoric, can often be unjust, Philosophia insists that this is ultimately overridden by “the sight of a judge who sees all things.” Philosophy's consolation is the knowledge that God rewards the good and punishes the wicked—if not in this world, then in the next.
The extent of Boethius’ consolation by philosophy is not known. He was cruelly tortured before being bludgeoned to death.
With Boethius’ bludgeoning and the collapse of learning in what remained of the classical world, I'd like to begin a journey through medieval philosophy. This will take us first to the barbaric north of England and Ireland, the Islamic and Judaic south of Córdoba, Baghdad and Persia, and then to the great medieval universities of Paris and Oxford. It's quite a journey.