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Lesson 3.7: The Darkening Age
12 Plays20 days ago
A dialect with an army becomes a language. A cult with an empire becomes a religion—and theology becomes a tool for social control.
Topics discussed:- From Diversity to Dogma: Early Christianity was a pluralistic and fragmented movement, but through imperial endorsement and councils like Nicaea (325 CE), it hardened into a singular orthodoxy, suppressing competing theologies like Arianism and Origenism.
- Power over Persuasion: The rise of Nicene Orthodoxy was not the result of philosophical consensus but imperial decree—Constantine and later emperors enforced doctrine to secure unity and political control, not theological truth.
- Platonism Repackaged for Empire: Thinkers like Origen infused Christianity with Platonic thought, but Church authorities retooled these mystical frameworks into rigid hierarchies that justified ecclesial and political authority.
- Augustine’s Turn to Authority: Initially drawn to philosophy and mysticism, Augustine later abandoned speculation in favor of doctrinal certainty, reinforcing Church authority and defining orthodoxy against “dangerous” alternatives like Pelagianism and Donatism.
- Original Sin as Political Theology: Augustine’s doctrine of inherited guilt and cognitive degradation bolstered imperial authority by portraying humanity as morally incapacitated and dependent on the institutional Church for salvation.
- The Church as Imperial Bureaucracy: As the Western Roman Empire crumbled, the Church emerged as its bureaucratic successor—rewriting history, consolidating power, and becoming the central authority in a post-imperial world.
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Transcript
Thematic Exploration of Early Christianity
00:00:02
Speaker
Thus far, what we've done in this course is we've looked at the history of early Christianity in a very kind of thematic kind of way. For example, in one lesson, we looked at heresies in early Christianity.
00:00:16
Speaker
And so that was sort of on a timescale. First, we looked at the very earliest heresies. Then we thought about the heresies that happened after the Council of Nicaea. So that was not exactly, you know, history in a linear way.
Evolution of Christian Ethics
00:00:31
Speaker
um more a thematic way. We also had a lesson on early Christian ethics, and that was also very much you know a theme that we covered and you not really expressing the whole gamut of views, but just looking at you know a couple of different ways to be a good Christian during the first couple of centuries of the Jesus movement.
00:00:52
Speaker
Early on, the way to be a Christian is to live with your chosen family and doing good works for others who had been tormented by Roman imperial policy. Later on, when there was a period of persecution of Christians and the doctrines of heaven and hell were developed,
00:01:11
Speaker
some Christians saw it as you know an ethical mandate to go get martyred. Later on, when Christianity became a favored religion and eventually the official religion of the Roman Empire, well, you couldn't get martyred anymore. And so Christian ethics changed once again.
00:01:30
Speaker
Some people thought it was their duty to destroy pagan stuff. Other people went out of the city and lived in the desert fighting demons, and that was their route to salvation.
00:01:43
Speaker
So Christian ethics, another theme that we've covered.
Elevation of Official Doctrine
00:01:47
Speaker
What I want to do in this lesson then is once again cover a different theme, and this would be the theme of creating orthodoxy.
00:01:59
Speaker
So one thing I want you to notice is this. So far, Christianity has not in the slightest been homogenous. In other words, there has been many, many different ways to behave like a Christian.
00:02:15
Speaker
There's many different beliefs that Christians have held that are, you know, conflicting with each other. Someone from Rome might be a Christian, but might believe different things than someone from Antioch or from Alexandria.
00:02:29
Speaker
So that's what I mean by Christianity not being homogenous. it Instead, it is heterogeneous, right? There's many different flavors of Christianity.
Christianity's Imperial Rise
00:02:40
Speaker
And so what I want to talk about today is about how one particular way of being a Christian, one particular Christian viewpoint came to be, i want to say, artificially elevated to be considered the official Christian doctrine.
00:03:01
Speaker
In other words, what I want to do in this lesson is tell the story of how out of all the different types of ways of being a Christian, one type of Christianity was pushed into the center.
00:03:16
Speaker
And this particular viewpoint led to Christianity rising to be an imperial power. You have to think about how weird that is, right?
00:03:26
Speaker
This movement began with a Jewish rebel who was executed by the Roman state. And over time, this movement grew and diversified.
Suppression of Intellectual Diversity
00:03:39
Speaker
And then out of all these different practices, one was, I'm going to go ahead and say chosen to be the official doctrine, even though all the other diverse sets of practices could lay equal claim to being, you know, official Christianity.
00:03:57
Speaker
But one was picked and it became the single authoritative interpretation. so I'm going to tell this story and this lesson.
00:04:07
Speaker
Let me now preface the punchline. As official doctrine was decided upon and then afterwards when it was enforced,
00:04:19
Speaker
all of this led to a great deal of suppression of intellectual diversity. In other words, this process, in the words of the historian Charles Freeman, is the beginning of the closing of the Western mind.
00:04:39
Speaker
I hope you see that throughout this process, time and time again, the sort of open-ended philosophical inquiry that had risen to a pretty high status in the Roman Empire was slowly demoted.
00:04:57
Speaker
and instead we have more so a worldview where things are true because the elite say so. Not because there's any rational argumentation for it, not because of evidence, but because the elite have decided that's how it should be.
Influence of Origen and Arius
00:05:15
Speaker
And so with that preface, let's get into the story.
00:05:19
Speaker
What I wanna do is I wanna begin right around the 200s. This was the time period of origin. And Origen's dates, by the way, are 185 to 253.
00:05:32
Speaker
And Origen is immensely influential in early Christianity, as is Arius after him. And I want to tell you what they believed again.
00:05:44
Speaker
so you can see that during this time period in the two hundreds there really was a high degree of compatibility between Platonic philosophy, the tradition initiated by Plato, and Christianity.
00:06:01
Speaker
i guess the first thing we should do is remind you a little bit about Plato. Plato, of course, believed that there is sort of a hierarchy of being and there is a divine realm where the forms live along with mathematical objects. And at the very top of that realm, overseeing everything in a sense,
00:06:24
Speaker
is the form of the good. Now, this is, you know, sort of a ah visual imagery that sometimes gets used to talk about the realm of the forms. Of course, the good is not physical, so it's not literally on top, but it's on top in a hierarchical sense, right? Everything comes from ultimately the good.
00:06:46
Speaker
And beneath this realm of the forms where the good is on top, you get the material world. And I guess technically below that, you get reflections and imitations.
00:07:00
Speaker
But that's roughly the hierarchical scheme that Plato endorses about the nature of reality. One other key aspect of Platonism that is relevant here is that you can kind of, if you interpret it in a particular way, dig out some epistemic elitism from Plato.
00:07:20
Speaker
That is to say, Plato believed that A very small number of people will be able to discover the true nature of reality through decades of training.
00:07:32
Speaker
And once they do, they should get full power. They're the ones that are in charge because they're the ones I know best. Everyone else should stay in their lane.
00:07:43
Speaker
So that's, of course, one interpretation of Plato. There's others, but we're going to stick with that one here because this seems to mirror very well what was going on in the early church.
00:07:54
Speaker
In the 200s, by the middle of the 200s, certainly, ah lot of aspects of Christian doctrine were lining up with those Platonic ideas I just mentioned.
Platonic Alignment with Christian Doctrine
00:08:05
Speaker
There is, in other words, a spiritual hierarchy. There is a divine realm. And there's, of course, this physical realm.
00:08:13
Speaker
And in the divine realm, there is someone at the very top, right? That would be God. The main difference between the good for Plato and God for Christians is that God is a person, right? With a will, desires, all that.
00:08:29
Speaker
And this comes from theology of Judaism, right? So Christians inherited some of their views from Judaism, some of their practices from philosophy, as I've made the case for already.
00:08:40
Speaker
that's one major difference. One other difference, I guess I can add now, is that Christians by this time period have added a new layer.
00:08:51
Speaker
There's not only the divine realm and the physical realm, But there's also a realm that's even further away from God, right? That would be hell. So there is no analog for hell in pagan philosophy, but it's an addition from Christians. Basically, it's a result of how badly they were being persecuted during a certain time period in their history.
00:09:13
Speaker
And so they sort of got a a theological revenge by coming up with a concept for what would happen to those people who were persecuting Christians, right? So that's where you get hell from. Nonetheless, despite these you know few differences, Platonism was basically sort of ideally suited for being the intellectual backbone for Christianity. Basically, the Platonists already had all the language, all the arguments, all the ways of thinking,
00:09:45
Speaker
that the Christians might need. They were used to talking about an immaterial world where the good is at the very top of the hierarchy. They were used to talking about how the material world is inferior to the you know divine realm.
00:09:59
Speaker
They were used to talking about the idea of a soul that is independent of the body. I'll remind you, in case you don't remember, in some of Plato's dialogues, we get a recounting of the last hours of Socrates.
00:10:13
Speaker
And Socrates seemed almost kind of glad that he was finally going to be free from his body. So just, you know, um he would be a pure thinking thing, right? Pure soul. So that's another reason for why Christians can basically adopt platonic ways of thinking as a defense for their own views.
00:10:33
Speaker
And of course, there's also this idea of epistemic elitism. During this time period in the church, sure, there is lots of heterogeneity as to you know what Christians thought they were supposed to believe.
00:10:51
Speaker
But one thing you'll notice, and I discussed it in a prior lesson, is that the heresies were sort of concentrated by regions. What does that mean?
00:11:02
Speaker
It means that, for example, in Rome, a certain kind of heresy was more dominant. And in Alexandria, a different viewpoint was more dominant.
00:11:13
Speaker
And in Antioch, ah another viewpoint was more dominant. And the reason for that was that the church
Universal Reconciliation in Neoplatonism
00:11:21
Speaker
hierarchy, that is, in other words, the bishops and the clergy in general,
00:11:27
Speaker
we're sort of conveying the message that only a few people could really a g glimpse into you know the the fundamental reality of the revelation of God.
00:11:39
Speaker
And you know only they can really understand it. And so if only the bishop really understands God's message, but that means that everyone else has to basically just rely on faith.
00:11:53
Speaker
Even Origen said this, and I will remind you of what Origen believed in a little bit, but I've hoped I persuaded you here that for a variety of reasons, it just looked like Christianity was going to be a Jewish version of Platonism.
00:12:10
Speaker
So what would this Jewish version of Platonism look like? Well, let's talk about two very important thinkers in this regard. Let's begin with Origen because he was first, chronologically speaking.
00:12:26
Speaker
And let's talk about his notion of heaven and hell. Of course, he believed in a heaven and a hell. Hell for Origen was the sort of state of being that was the furthest away from god So it wasn't exactly ah place.
00:12:46
Speaker
It was a state of being. It was those people who turned away the furthest from God. And of course, no one turned away from God more than the devil and his demons.
00:12:59
Speaker
But here is where it gets interesting. Origen believed that even the worst sinners and even the devil and his demons would all, after probably immense suffering, purificatory suffering, we can call it, they would all eventually return to God.
00:13:21
Speaker
This is sometimes called universalism. It's also sometimes called the theory of universal reconciliation. ah basically, eventually, everyone will return to God.
00:13:35
Speaker
How is this a version of Platonism? Well, this very closely mirrors lots of Platonic ideas. I'm going to speak in particular about the Neoplatonic idea of return that we find in Plotinus.
00:13:52
Speaker
Remember, according to Plotinus, everything comes from the one, one of the three hypostases. And you can sort of imagine it like ah like concentric circles, right? And at the very center is the one and everything, you know, grows out in all directions from there.
00:14:10
Speaker
Well, According to Plotinus, all things eventually return to the one. And in fact, we ourselves can have this experience of returning to the one. This is exactly the kind of thing that you have when you have mystical experiences.
00:14:30
Speaker
You feel yourself dissolving into the one or maybe a better, more appropriate way of saying it is that you feel that yourself transitions into being the one because it is no longer, there's no longer duality. and So the point being here is that there is this notion of return in Plotinus. First, you emanate from the one, that's the process of going outward.
00:14:54
Speaker
And then when you return to the one that is called return. Well, isn't that exactly what Origen is saying? Yeah, we all go out and we live our lives, but everyone it will eventually return to the one or God, right? So that is universal reconciliation.
00:15:12
Speaker
And that pretty closely mirrors Neoplatonic ideas. So that is one way that originism really just is a you know, Judaic Christian version of Platonism.
00:15:28
Speaker
There are some other things that we can mention in origin that are very, very platonic indeed. Like Plato, origin believed that our souls existed before we were born in heaven, in the divine realm, and that we need to learn the message of God through allegorical interpretation of the Bible.
00:15:52
Speaker
So if you recall, Plotinus believed that we have to engage in allegorical interpretation of Plato's dialogues, which are basically like his scripture. Basically for Plotinus, Plato's dialogues are the Bible, his own Bible, right? His Platonic Bible.
00:16:11
Speaker
Anyway, all that stuff is very Platonic. It's especially Neoplatonic, which was the dominant form of Platonism at the time. And so you can see that Origen's philosophy was very much a Platonic version of Christianity.
00:16:29
Speaker
Let's also talk about Arius. Arius came a little bit after Origen. Actually, basically, when Origen dies, Arius is born three years later.
00:16:41
Speaker
Arius's dates are 256 to 336 CE.
Arianism and Subordinationism
00:16:47
Speaker
And so he really kind of runs with this, ah you know, platonic way of seeing things, right? So he maybe gets some ideas from origin.
00:16:55
Speaker
He develops some of his own. For example, according to Arius, Jesus was God's first creation. In other words, they are not co-eternal.
00:17:11
Speaker
and thus they are not co-equal, one ah subordinate to the other. In other words, Jesus is subordinate to God. This, once more, is extremely platonic in nature. Remember that according to Plotinus, there are the three hypostases.
00:17:33
Speaker
It's the one, who gives a rise to divine intellect and soul with a capital S, you can imagine. And by the way, these latter two, divine intellect and soul, they're the ones that bring out um bring about the material world.
00:17:49
Speaker
That's the process called emanation, right? Going from the top to the bottom or from the center out, however you want to think about it. Anyway, the point here is that divine intellect and soul come from the one, according to Plotinus, just like Jesus and the Holy Spirit come from ah Father.
00:18:13
Speaker
And so, according to Arius, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, they are not co-equal with the Father, but they are subordinate to the Father. So that's how Arianism is very platonic indeed.
00:18:29
Speaker
Well, these were the views that were very much in vogue in the two hundreds and early three hundreds In fact, various major figures in this stage of proto-Christianity, including one very important church historian named Eusebius, they were all strongly leaning toward Origen and Arius, right? So Origenism and Arianism were...
00:18:57
Speaker
almost, not quite, but almost universally accepted by the bishops. And in turn, because the bishops decide on the views of their, you know, other followers,
00:19:08
Speaker
Basically, almost all Christians, or at least a majority of Christians, were leaning in these very platonically influenced directions. And so that's the end of the story, right?
The Council of Nicaea and Constantine's Influence
00:19:20
Speaker
Originism becomes the official doctrine and Christianity is, oh wait, no, not quite. Eventually, Origin gets condemned as a heretic, as does Arius, right?
00:19:36
Speaker
How did that happen? Well, in order to tell that story, we need to transition now into the Council of Nicaea.
00:19:48
Speaker
Nicaea is in modern-day Turkey, and let's make our way over there now.
00:20:20
Speaker
First and foremost, what is the Council of Nicaea? Well, it's an ecumenical council, and it's actually the very first ecumenical council ever.
00:20:31
Speaker
and what that means is that all the bishops come together. In the case of this first one, is it it was over 300. And they come together and they discuss and resolve theological disputes and settle upon an official doctrine, right?
00:20:48
Speaker
What do we believe? Now, the fact that this is the first ecumenical council should signal to you that something is different here. Why is there a need to settle upon, you know, some sort of official doctrine? Why are we having theological disputes that just need to be resolved all of a sudden?
00:21:10
Speaker
Well, that is because the emperor of Rome at the time, three hundreds early 300s, was a man named Constantine, and history has come to know him as Constantine the Great.
00:21:24
Speaker
Now, Constantine is a complicated figure, and I won't get into many of the details of his life now. ah Maybe a little bit later, I'll mention ah few of those tidbits, but But basically, Constantine claims to have had ah revelation, a divine vision.
00:21:46
Speaker
And he won an important battle by basically using Christian imagery for his ah and armed forces. So because of this, Constantine not only legalizes Christianity,
00:22:03
Speaker
But eventually begins to you know give the Christian clergy favors. Things like you know tax breaks and they were relieved of certain civic duties. you know Every Roman had to do certain civic duties, but the clergy didn't have to.
00:22:20
Speaker
And so once you legalize Christianity and give it a few perks... you have to really get clear on who it is that is actually getting these perks, right? Because if you just say, hey, you know, anyone that's a Christian, you know, I will go ahead and give you the following benefits.
00:22:41
Speaker
Well, during this time period, a lot of people are going to line up and they don't seem to agree on what it means to be a Christian. if What Constantine found himself compelled to do is to figure out, okay, so what is the official doctrine of Christianity? Who am I giving favors to?
00:23:02
Speaker
And so that's what this council was convened for. him Now, a bunch of things were talked about during this council. We're going focus on maybe the main showdown.
00:23:13
Speaker
That is between subordinationism and anti-subordinationism. We have already covered this. This is actually the view of Arius, who we just mentioned.
00:23:25
Speaker
The question is basically this.
Debate on Jesus' Divinity
00:23:27
Speaker
Was Jesus created and thus subordinate to the Father? Or was Jesus not created? Is he actually co-eternal and thus co-equal with the Father?
00:23:42
Speaker
Well, depending on how you answer that question, you are either a subordinationist or an anti-subordinationist. Arius was a subordinationist.
00:23:53
Speaker
Jesus was created and thus subordinate to God the Father. And if you denied this, you are an anti-subordinationist. You believe that the Son and the Father are co-equal.
00:24:07
Speaker
Well, as I already mentioned when I was talking about the views of Arius, subordinationism, which is again Arianism, was almost universally accepted in the early church.
00:24:21
Speaker
I mentioned earlier that various important figures accepted it. It also had a bunch of you know scriptural support. Basically, you can read parts of Christian scripture the Old Testament, the Gospels, Paul's letters, and you can pull out certain passages that sort of clearly have a subordinationist flavor to them.
00:24:45
Speaker
Sometimes they're just straight out support for subordinationism. don't want to sit here and read a bunch of Bible verses to you, but let me just give you a couple. Here is Mark chapter 13, verse 32. Jesus states,
00:25:00
Speaker
But of that day or hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. That sounds like the Father has knowledge beyond that of the Son.
00:25:18
Speaker
They are not equal. In other words, one is subordinate to the other, the Son to the Father. John 14, 28 says, Jesus says,
00:25:30
Speaker
The Father is greater than I. That's pretty blatantly subordinationist. One more from Paul's letters. 1 Corinthians 15, verse 28. Paul writes,
00:25:45
Speaker
When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.
00:25:58
Speaker
So the Son himself will be subjected to the Father. Yeah, that sounds pretty subordinationist as well. So for all these reasons, subordinationism was looking like it was going to win.
00:26:13
Speaker
That didn't happen. Why? That would be in large part due to a man named Athanasius.
Athanasius and Nicene Creed Outcome
00:26:25
Speaker
Athanasius was born in 297. So he was in his late 20s during the Council of Nicaea. And he almost single-handedly railed against subordinationism and Arius as well as his followers. By the way, Arius was at the Council of Nicaea. So he literally did rail against him physically as like the person.
00:26:50
Speaker
Anyway, Athanasius' is official title was the Patriarch of Alexandria. He wanted to s think about it as the Bishop of Alexandria. That's cool. And whereas the subordinationists had, you know, scriptural evidence supporting their view,
00:27:09
Speaker
Athanasius didn't. um It's kind of funny because he it looks like really the reason why he believed in anti-subordinationism had to do with his just views on human nature. He basically thought that we were, that we are supremely corrupt.
00:27:31
Speaker
We're just naturally sinful. And in fact, we're so desperately incorrigible, right? Like unfixable that God had to, had to present an emanation of himself as the son to make sure that we behave right and believe and ensure redemption.
00:27:56
Speaker
In other words, we are so bad and we are just so prone to sin that we wouldn't believe if God sent someone other than himself.
00:28:10
Speaker
In other words, we just wouldn't believe, says Athanasius, If God the Father sent his number two, only number one himself, the Father, taking on human form, only that would persuade us to accept Christian doctrine, behave in the right ways, and thus be saved eventually, hopefully.
00:28:34
Speaker
So that's why Athanasius pushed for anti-subordinationism. Maybe I could add here what some historians believe is that he was a bit of an anti-intellectual.
00:28:47
Speaker
We do have evidence of this. It's not just me talking. For example, we actually get a biography of St. Anthony from Athanasius.
00:28:58
Speaker
St. Anthony, you'll recall, is one of the Desert Fathers. Maybe you can even think of him as Desert Desert Father, sort of a figurehead of the movement. But the way that Athanasius portrayed St. Anthony is a basically illiterate, unlettered man who relied only on faith and didn't engage in any kind of philosophical speculation. It was just, you know, faith and work. That's it.
00:29:28
Speaker
That's not what Anthony was actually like. We actually have discovered some of Anthony's letters, historians and archaeologists have. And Anthony was very well educated. He was not an unlettered person.
00:29:42
Speaker
And he, in fact, wrote profoundly with great philosophical acumen about his ascetic practice. And so the fact that Athanasius is sort of misrepresenting Anthony towards being someone who just kind of was led by faith, no reason whatsoever, that shows that he just doesn't trust that people through reason will come to do the right thing.
00:30:07
Speaker
We have to be sort of, you know, shocked into submission. We need to be awed by number one, the father coming down to earth and telling us what to do. So the punchline for Athanasius, you know, rational argumentation and philosophical living where you reason guides you into doing the right thing. That's all out the window.
00:30:29
Speaker
What we really need are methods of social control. We need to scare people, shock and awe them into doing the right thing. That's why he advocated anti-subordinationism and anti-subordinationism eventually became the official doctrine.
00:30:50
Speaker
The way that this happened had, sure, quite a bit to do with Athanasius, but Constantine the Great, the emperor of Rome himself, stepped in and helped settle the issue.
00:31:06
Speaker
So let's talk for a bit about Constantine's role.
Constantine's Political Maneuvering
00:31:10
Speaker
Let me begin by saying that for Constantine, this dispute between subordinationism and anti-subordinationism was just trivial speculation, you know, splitting hairs, who cares?
00:31:26
Speaker
A lot of people felt that way, usually non-Christians. For example, we have reports that this dispute made it into the theaters.
00:31:38
Speaker
In other words, playwrights ah writing about it. And, you know, I don't know exactly what the play was, but you can sort of imagine maybe two characters who were arguing about nothing. And then eventually they realized this and they said, oh, man, what are we doing? What are we Christians?
00:31:53
Speaker
And so people were making fun of this dispute. But Constantine was beginning to give political favors to the Christian clergy, right? So it needed to be settled. He needed to know who he's actually giving political favors to.
00:32:10
Speaker
Can't be everyone. so Who are the Christians? Will the real Christians please stand up? And that's why he called the Council of Nicaea in 325.
00:32:21
Speaker
Really, he just called a bunch of bishops to his residence. He had a house there in Nicaea. And they were going to hopefully hash it out and settle on some doctrine.
00:32:35
Speaker
Well, Constantine was probably not pleased at all with what actually happened. It was just a bunch of never-ending feuding. And in fact, this happened many times.
00:32:48
Speaker
We don't have a direct transcript of what happened at the first council of Nicaea, but we do get some tidbits from other events where Constantine had to deal with the bishops.
00:33:01
Speaker
And here's actually a quote from Constantine in some separate event that um But that sort of shows you that he was sort of sick of the infighting between the bishops.
00:33:14
Speaker
So here is Constantine the Great, quote, you, the bishops, do nothing but that which encourages discord and hatred, and to speak frankly, which leads to the destruction of the human race.
00:33:30
Speaker
So Constantine clearly fed up with the bishops. It looks like when they were discussing this dispute in particular between subordinationism and anti-subordinationism, Constantine intervened.
00:33:46
Speaker
And he did what Constantine does best. He used his political tactics to push through a solution, a resolution.
00:33:58
Speaker
Here is what he did. He suggested that the correct way of describing the relationship between the father and the son was to declare them of one substance. That's the translation of the Latin term homo oecios.
00:34:17
Speaker
I think I pronounced that correctly. I don't know. But basically, let's just say that the father and the son are of one substance. How is that so politically savvy?
00:34:31
Speaker
Well, basically, Arius, who defended subordinationism, was there with his followers And Constantine knew they would never accept that term, right?
00:34:43
Speaker
Omoisios of one substance, they just wouldn't be okay with that. That means that they would be isolated. so let's just say that the Arians are roughly one third of the bishops.
00:34:55
Speaker
They would say no to that term. But the other two-thirds of the bishops, they probably would have no problem with that whatsoever. And so by introducing this term that isolates one faction and unifies the rest, what Constantine was able to do is to get the...
00:35:18
Speaker
decision-making majority in line, right? So basically he got enough people, bishops, to back this term as being the resolution here for what it is that Christians believe and sort of just pushed it through, sort of sidelining Arius and his followers.
00:35:37
Speaker
That is A, very, very politically savvy, but also B, not terribly flattering for Christian doctrine.
00:35:52
Speaker
Let's begin with the first part, right? so this is me very politically savvy because the term got pushed through And so as a result, the council produced the Nicene Creed, right which is a statement of belief for early Christianity.
00:36:09
Speaker
And in this creed, it was official, right? Jesus was co-equal and co-eternal with God the Father, and they were of the same substance.
00:36:21
Speaker
The point being, though, is that they have an official creed now, and that took some crafty political maneuvering. But once you get the policy, hey, you got the policy. That's that's what you wanted, right? So good.
00:36:35
Speaker
But now let's move on to the second clause there, B, right? This is not very flattering, right? And if you blinked, you might have missed it. But this is yet more epistemic authoritarianism creeping into the church. Actually, it's not even epistemic authoritarianism.
00:36:56
Speaker
It's just straight authoritarianism. Notice that this dispute was not settled through debate, right? It wasn't enlightened argumentation.
00:37:09
Speaker
There was no divine inspiration that we know of. Here's what it was. The most powerful man on the planet pushed through his solution just to get on with things.
00:37:26
Speaker
And again, really, it seems like he didn't care. To him, it was arbitrary which view we ultimately chose. just didn't matter. And so one view was simply artificially elevated over the other. It was not based on evidence. It was doctrine by decree.
00:37:48
Speaker
Now, you might need some persuading of this, that it wasn't maybe divinely inspired or something like that. Well, the best evidence I can give you of this is by talking a little bit about Constantine himself.
00:38:02
Speaker
Remember, this was Constantine's political strategy that got this particular term in to produce the Nicene Creed. And so it matters the sort of man that he was And the kind of man that he was, was not, you know, ah morally upright, wholesome person with good character.
00:38:23
Speaker
Constantine was brutal and ruthless. Morally speaking, he was just deplorable. And for all intents and purposes, he wasn't a Christian.
00:38:37
Speaker
He seemed to be just a regular pagan. Let me give you evidence of that now. So in 330 CE, five years after the Council of Nicaea, and that's important because now we have a Nicene Creed. Now we have a statement of faith and we can check if Constantine is going to abide by that statement of faith. If he really did convert to Christianity, he should abide by the Nicene Creed. It doesn't seem like he did.
00:39:08
Speaker
so The empire gets a new capital in 330 CE. Constantine is building it. It will be called Constantinople because he is a very humble man. That was a joke, by the way.
00:39:21
Speaker
And let me I guess I should say this. The reason for this capital, new capital, is that Constantine was feeling that strategically and defensively,
00:39:33
Speaker
They just needed a different center of power that's a little bit closer to the eastern border so they can you know defend the border more effectively and more quickly, more efficiently, etc. right So it was a strategic thing. Although really, you know the Roman Empire was always kind of two halves, at least after the conquest of all the Hellenic kingdoms.
00:39:55
Speaker
there really was a sense in which there was always two halves of the Roman Empire, the Western more Latin speaking half and the Eastern more Greek speaking half.
00:40:07
Speaker
And so this was kind of sort of bound to happen eventually. But now there's two capitals. And sometime after this, in the 390s, you will actually get enough official splitting of the empire into the Western and Eastern half.
00:40:22
Speaker
And in any case, Konstantin's role in this is that he makes a flashy new capital in 330 CE. That is once more Constantinople.
00:40:33
Speaker
Today, by the way, this city is Istanbul, which if you want to go check it out, it looks very nice. I've never been there, but it's on the list. In any case, as Constantine is building car in Constantinople, this is where you can see that he was not a Christian, right?
Political Motives Behind Constantinople's Construction
00:40:50
Speaker
He did not seem to believe in the Nicene Creed, which means that everything that he did at the Council of Nicaea but just political, right?
00:41:01
Speaker
So here's evidence first that he was not a Christian. When he was building this capital, he just went full-blown pagan. He followed all the pagan and religious rituals when they were laying the foundations down to all the buildings.
00:41:16
Speaker
He brought in pagan statues from Rome to line the streets. He just did everything like a pagan. And so if that's what he was, Why did he do what he did at the Council of Nicaea? what what is he What is his deal?
00:41:33
Speaker
Why is he involved in Christianity? Well, it looks like, historians think, that what Constantine wanted was simply a supreme religion by which he can infuse order into the empire.
00:41:48
Speaker
In other words, he was agreeing a little bit with Athanasius. He wanted a method of social control, a means of unifying everyone in the Roman Empire under one national identity.
00:42:03
Speaker
And so one good way to do that is by having one supreme religion with one God, right? So one God, one empire. That was the motivation, very likely, that drove Constantine.
00:42:17
Speaker
I have here a quote from the historian Charles Freeman. In truth, there is no evidence for any commitment from Constantine to building a heavenly kingdom on earth, still less for any personal piety.
00:42:33
Speaker
Constantine's relationship with Christ will always remain unclear, but it certainly did not temper his ambition to destroy his rivals or restrain the brutality with which he eliminated them.
00:42:47
Speaker
In many of his pronouncements, Christ appears only as a symbol of order and unity. So there it Constantine's involvement with Christianity was simply for the sake of order and unity.
00:43:02
Speaker
Now, it's not clear that's what he got, but let's talk very briefly about the aftermath of the Council of Nicaea.
00:43:14
Speaker
First and foremost, we get new heresies, right? Origenism would eventually be deemed heretical. Of course, Origen believed that everyone would eventually be saved in sort of like a Neoplatonic return.
00:43:27
Speaker
Well, that was not cool. And guess who it was that railed against it again? Athanasius. Athanasius believed that without the threat of eternal punishment, most would be disinclined, shall we say, to submit to the church. In other words, you need to scare people.
00:43:49
Speaker
through the threat of eternal damnation in order to get them to believe and submit to the church. So that was Athanasius who made sure that originism was condemned as a heresy.
00:44:02
Speaker
Of course, Arianism was also condemned as a heresy. And now that there's an official doctrine, Roman emperors knew who to give political favors to.
00:44:14
Speaker
And so Christianity comes to be funded by the empire. And that means that bishops started to gain political clout and wealth. And that means that churches were becoming more opulent. Right now you have the money from the empire to make really extravagant churches. So that's when that began.
Post-Nicaea Heresies and Opulence
00:44:35
Speaker
oh and by the way, Plato was once again commandeered to justify this. People were complaining. It seems like a lot of money was being spent on these churches not only for building them, but also running them. A lot of candles were being made to light these churches twenty four seven And so people were wondering, hey, is this really in line with Christian ethics?
00:45:00
Speaker
Well, that's where Plato comes in. Plato taught that, of course, this world is a cheap copy of the divine realm, right the realm of being. But importantly, in Symposium,
00:45:14
Speaker
Plato taught that beautiful things are like a gateway to catching little glimpses of the divine realm. right The form of beauty is the most easily accessible. And through that form, we can come to know the other forms.
00:45:31
Speaker
So why do we need really fancy, expensive, extravagant churches? because they're a glimpse of the divine realm. They help you see the world to come and help motivate you to act in the right way to get you eventually to heaven.
00:45:49
Speaker
So that was another consequence of the Council of Nicaea. Then, of course, there was more violence. We've already talked about how pagans were being targeted.
00:46:01
Speaker
Heretics were also targeted. Origen is the person that I'll mention briefly, but Origen wrote over 2000 works. Most of them are now lost, and that's because lot of them were destroyed.
00:46:18
Speaker
once he was condemned as a heretic by Christians. So just like Christians were destroying pagan art and temples, they were also destroying heretical writings and harassing heretics.
00:46:33
Speaker
So that's another consequence of the Council of Nicaea. And one more Once they got the authoritarian ball rolling, well, it began to snowball.
00:46:49
Speaker
Throughout the history of the church, multiple other times, Roman emperors intervened to settle disputes about Christian doctrine.
00:47:01
Speaker
In other words, churning out the theology of Christianity came to be, in part, a political process, and it was enforced from the top down.
00:47:16
Speaker
We the clergy decide what's the right interpretation of God's message, and the rest of you just have to believe.
00:48:00
Speaker
So now that we've seen behind the curtains and seen how the sausage of Christian doctrine gets made, next question I want to cover is something like this.
Challenges in Coherent Christian Worldview
00:48:15
Speaker
If you have a set of doctrines that get pushed through via a political process, or at least a large part of political process, and that process isn't always about coherent doctrine but more so about social control will what emerges be a coherent worldview or can one develop a coherent worldview from this set of doctrines that get pushed through I'll give you one example of what I mean here, just so you can kind of sink your teeth into the question itself.
00:48:52
Speaker
But I mentioned earlier that this stage of Christianity, early 300s, let's say, is looking a lot like it's going to go in the direction of a Christian version of Platonism.
00:49:05
Speaker
But that wasn't going to be an easy thing ever, even without Athanasius and Constantine. That's because Plato believed that The realm of the forms was eternal. And of course, the realm of the forms the real reality, right? The fundamental source of all everything that we see here in the physical realm.
00:49:28
Speaker
So one way of putting Plato's views on the universe is that it's eternal. It's always been there. But of course, Christianity got many of its views from Judaism And in Judaism, there is a doctrine of creation ex nihilo, out of nothing.
00:49:49
Speaker
So the question is, had Christianity been this full-blown version of Platonism that it was trending towards, how would they have settled this thing about creation?
00:50:02
Speaker
Would they have gotten rid of Genesis and just said, okay, well, you know, it's always existed. Or would they reinterpret Genesis and say, you know, what they really meant by this is something else. So it's not clear that Christianity, being having so many different tributaries into its into its reservoir, it's unclear how they would have made all of those cohere in a way.
00:50:28
Speaker
And I think it's fair to say that it takes a rigorous and intelligent mind to try to do that. And so what we're going to do now is take a look at the work of a very important figure in the history of early Christianity.
00:50:46
Speaker
His name is Augustine of Hippo. Some people pronounce it Augustine of Hippo. I'm going to stick with Augustine, but I think both are correct.
00:50:57
Speaker
And I should add that he is now a saint. So some people call a Saint Augustine or Saint Augustine. In any case, Augustine is the next figure we will cover because he comes a few decades after the Council of Nicaea.
00:51:14
Speaker
He is born in 354 CE. And that means that these doctrines that have been, you know, decided upon and some new ones coming along the way, there's more councils, of course.
00:51:26
Speaker
Now there's a set of doctrines that need to be made cohesive. And that's exactly what Augustine does. Or it's at least what he tries to do. So let's begin with just kind of a general bio and maybe an overview of some of his views.
00:51:44
Speaker
Then after this, we'll do a ah deeper dive into some important concepts by him. But let's start with just the facts.
Augustine's Philosophical Journey
00:51:52
Speaker
Augustine was born in what is modern day Algeria, and he was born to a pagan father and a Christian mother.
00:52:01
Speaker
Now, early on in his life, he seems to have gravitated towards the contemplative, And by the way, whenever we say contemplative and we're talking about the ancient world, we typically mean towards the mystical. That's what contemplative means, right? They're interested in mystical stuff.
00:52:21
Speaker
And so that seems to be what he was really into. And for that reason, he dabbled in a couple of schools of thought that are, you know, have some overlaps with contemplative stuff.
00:52:37
Speaker
For example, he dabbled with Manichaeanism, but more to the point, he was in the Platonic tradition for a little bit. He was both a skeptic about the census. So remember the academy went skeptical for a little bit. So there was a tradition of skepticism within Platonism.
00:52:55
Speaker
And of course, Augustine was also interested in the practices espoused by Plotinus. That's that Neoplatonism where you return to the one. And by the way, we do have reports in Augustine. He sort of wrote like an autobiography.
00:53:13
Speaker
And we do have reports in that autobiography where he tells us that he had some mystical experiences. In fact, he even had mystical experiences simultaneously with his mother.
00:53:28
Speaker
right So they both had a mystical experience at the same time. Very interesting story. But of course, eventually he came to see Christianity as the right path, right? The ultimate spiritual path towards God.
00:53:45
Speaker
Now, because he is, you know, coming from a Platonic tradition, Augustine admits to seeing Christianity as a kind of Platonism for the masses.
00:53:56
Speaker
So remember the kind of Platonism that he was practicing the variety espoused by Plotinus, that is very esoteric in that it is very challenging and you know requires a lot of study and meditation and solitude and and it's tough.
00:54:14
Speaker
And so what Augustine sees in Christianity and is a kind of Platonism that has, you know, it's just more easily digestible.
00:54:25
Speaker
There's imagery that is easy to visualize, and the moral teachings are presented sometimes as parables. And so it's a lot easier to get into. And so that's what Augustine really liked about Christianity, and sort of a Platonism for the masses.
00:54:43
Speaker
Let me tell you about a few differences between the younger Augustine and the older Augustine. Early Augustine, as I already mentioned, really gravitated towards the mystical.
00:54:56
Speaker
He, in fact, he wanted to be a monk. And when he was actually you know nominated and elected to be a bishop, he was a little bummed out because he wanted to go be a monk in the desert, right? That's what he wanted to do.
00:55:11
Speaker
And if you are a bishop, well, you're in the city. So that's a different life path. In any case, he does eventually become a bishop. And as he gets older, Augustine grows more conservative.
00:55:26
Speaker
In some cases, he grows a little more dogmatic, a little less open to philosophical inquiry and more so deciding things just have to be accepted on faith.
00:55:39
Speaker
So maybe that's just part of the life process. We all get more conservative we when we get older. I'm not sure. But that definitely happened for Augustine, and I'll make the case for that so a little bit later.
00:55:53
Speaker
might also be just by the way that it was his job that sort of made him more conservative. So during this time period, again, he was a bishop and bishops at that point too were essentially making in imperial policy, right? So In the year 380, Christianity becomes the official religion of Rome.
00:56:15
Speaker
That happens when Emperor Theodosius issues the Edict of Thessalonica. And so now if you're a bishop and you're you know you're a bishop for the official religion of the empire, what you say really matters.
00:56:29
Speaker
So you have to be very, very careful about saying the right things. And of course, if you say something that's way too off kilter, remember, you might get condemned for heresy, right? So you have to be very careful, mindful on the one hand that what you say will shape people's lives, but on the other, that what you say might get you arrested, right? So very careful. And maybe that's what led to some of his conservatism later on in his life.
00:56:58
Speaker
Who knows? We do know that that's a change that happened. And here are some other changes so we can kind of make this case that he changed over time.
Augustine's Shift Towards Dogma
00:57:08
Speaker
Initially, he was very much committed to reason, to the power of reason, I should say.
00:57:14
Speaker
And he used scripture as sort of a launching pad for, you know, theological speculation. But as he got older, he became more dogmatic in the sense that he didn't believe in the power of reason anymore. So basically, he didn't engage in this kind of speculation that he used to do when he was younger. and He took the doctrines that had been decreed through you know the councils, the ecumenical councils, and he used them as his starting point, sort of without question. Okay, here's what they decided is true.
00:57:51
Speaker
Let me figure out how to make these things fit together. So no more original speculation, more so trying to fit the puzzle pieces together. I hope that makes sense, right? It's the opposite of reading scripture and coming up with your own interpretations, right?
00:58:08
Speaker
It's not the, you know, open-minded intellectual culture of the Platonic Academy. It's more so, here's what I'm supposed to believe. Let me figure out how to make this into a system.
00:58:20
Speaker
I'll talk more about how he became a little bit more conservative and and less so a believer in reason later. What I want to just kind of show you here very briefly is that he kind of became more so also like a stickler and, you know, maybe almost...
00:58:41
Speaker
um harsh, right? he he It was about retribution at a certain point. So towards the end of his life, he would recommend for Christians to die rather than eat the foods that had been sacrificed to pagan gods.
00:58:58
Speaker
So in other words, let's say you're a Christian and you're starving and there's no food around except for um the food that has been consecrated for some pagan deity. Well, Augustine says, it's better for you to die than to eat that food.
00:59:12
Speaker
And that's pretty extreme, right? This is just something that itt it didn't seem like he would say that sort of thing earlier. Here's a very straightforward one.
00:59:23
Speaker
i had mentioned before that some early Christians sought martyrdom. They saw it as their duty to go out and and try to get persecuted. One of the groups that had members that would seek martyrdom are known or were known as the Donatists.
00:59:41
Speaker
Now, they weren't alone. Other groups of Christians did also seek martyrdom. But the Donatists were, you know, sort of exceptional because they had their own heresy that they kind of rallied around.
00:59:55
Speaker
They believed that only virtuous priests can administer the sacraments. In other words, if you got baptized by a priest who is actually, you know, not a very good person, well, then your baptism didn't count.
01:00:11
Speaker
right So that that that was a Donatist. Augustine rallied the church to persecute them. He thought, you know, they're not good for business. We have to make an example of them.
01:00:26
Speaker
And so he really pushed for the church to persecute them. So that is, again, you know, that's retributive, right? and We have to go punish. We have to make an example of people. We need these methods of social control.
01:00:37
Speaker
So this is just, you know, some highlights. so you can see that over time, Augustine just became, he went from a mystic, basically, who wanted to just be in solitude praying to saying, hey, these people don't believe exactly what we believe. We got it. We got to go for them.
01:00:52
Speaker
Right. So that's quite the change. Again, those are just some examples. We will talk about some other things that he changed his mind about later on, for example, on free will and his views on God.
Augustine's Influence on Christian Dogma
01:01:06
Speaker
But what I want to say right now is that i want to just basically give you the punchline of Augustine. want to tell you why he matters so much.
01:01:17
Speaker
Many of Augustine's views eventually came to be established as dogmas not to be questioned. In other words, Augustine is one of those people that's going to play a considerable role in shaping the tenor of Christianity.
01:01:35
Speaker
in visualizing what Christianity is now that it is an imperial religion. And so that's why Augustine matters. With that sort of prelude, let's get into some important philosophical ideas coming from Augustine.
01:01:55
Speaker
And I will begin with early Augustine, right? More so the mystic. So let's talk about young Augustine and his views on the self.
01:02:08
Speaker
So Augustine typically gets a ton of credit for the development of the Western notion of a self. I'm going to give him some credit and some credit to the people that came before him.
01:02:24
Speaker
So let me do that now. And by the way, this comes from a very interesting book called The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self.
01:02:36
Speaker
by Martin and Baresi. And what I'll say is this, you wouldn't get Augustine's views on the self without, of course, Plato.
01:02:49
Speaker
Augustine draws deeply from Plato, especially from a dialogue known as the Timaeus. In that dialogue, Plato attempts to resolve something called the mind-body problem.
01:03:02
Speaker
So what is the mind-body problem? Basically, if your soul is not physical, but your body is physical, there seems to be no way through which your body can interact with your soul. I mean, how would that even work? How does a non-physical thing interact with a physical thing?
01:03:27
Speaker
Some people, by the way, say it's actually impossible for non-physical things to interact with physical things. So that's an argument against the existence of a soul. But for our purposes, let's just notice that there is a puzzle here. I mean, how do the two interact?
01:03:44
Speaker
Well, Plato here is proposing the following. He basically says, well, you're thinking about souls in the wrong way. The soul is not a single simple entity.
01:03:55
Speaker
And he says instead there is there's sort of a dual structure. Maybe someone would say even two souls, right? There is a non-physical rational soul that's sort of you know facing the divine or oriented toward the divine.
01:04:14
Speaker
And then there's a more material, physical soul that is aligned with the body, right? The one that's more so in charge of like your base desires and your appetites.
01:04:26
Speaker
So you have a more carnal soul and a more heavenly soul. And they're sort of, you know, because they're both souls, they can interact with each other. um And so that's how that interaction takes place between something non-physical and something physical.
01:04:43
Speaker
Maybe you don't like Plato's proposed solution. That's sort of irrelevant here. It looks like Augustine liked it. And so here is one more important part to Plato's solution or potential solution so that we can move into Augustine.
01:05:01
Speaker
For Plato, that more physical soul, the one that's more so aligned with the body, that one is the one that's basically responsible for all that inner psychological conflict that characterizes human life, right? So sometimes you have...
01:05:22
Speaker
You know, you want to get something done. You have ah some um aim in mind, but your body says, let's just lie down instead. Oh, let's go eat something. Or, you know, there is just, you know, those desires that sort of conflict with your higher order aims and and and goals.
01:05:39
Speaker
And that's what, you know, that's how Plato kind of envisioned it. Some people, by the way, see this model from Plato ah sort of like a precursor to the modern notion of the unconscious.
01:05:52
Speaker
So, you know, sometimes you get appetites and desires that sort of operate outside of our direct rational control. That's why you feel conflicted sometimes, right?
01:06:04
Speaker
you You want to consciously do one thing, but your body wants to do something else. So that's the way Plato was looking at things. And Augustine reads this, he absorbs it, he likes it, I should add, and he adapts this framework into a Christian theological context.
01:06:24
Speaker
So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what's sort of uniquely Christian in in a bit, but let me just kind of give you the general overview of Augustine's model of the self.
01:06:38
Speaker
So for Augustine, the human self is always torn between two poles.
Dual Self in Augustine's Model
01:06:44
Speaker
There is the higher self that yearns for God, right?
01:06:49
Speaker
And it has to do a lot with reflecting on yourself, being sort of inward directed. That's your true self, by the way. And there's also a lower outward facing self.
01:07:01
Speaker
That's the one that's sort of, you know, distracted by desires and needs and, and appetites and that's your false self. So as you can see, Augustine retains that dual structure that Plato suggested and Augustine basically calls it the true self and the false self.
01:07:22
Speaker
And of course, the true self is the one that's looking toward God. And the false self is the one that, you know, makes you look at and Earth instead, all these terrestrial things, right? the the the All the goods that you can have here.
01:07:34
Speaker
And of course, just like in Plato, Augustine wants us to identify with our true self, right? It's all about aligning with the self that is geared toward God. and And so just as in Plato, this is like an extreme spiritual quest, right? Because you have to overcome, first of all, self-deception. Remember, both for Plato and for Augustine, this physical world, it's not the real thing. It's not the ultimate thing, that's for sure. yeah The ultimate thing is the divine realm, and that's where you want to go.
01:08:11
Speaker
But your body, it says, oh you eat that food. oh you know, let's make more money. oh you know, it's it's all about the physical realm. So you have to overcome the deception that comes to you courtesy of the false self and instead look upward.
01:08:27
Speaker
Additionally, you have to sort of like contain and order your desires, right? They don't order you, you order them. And so that's another part of the spiritual quest.
01:08:38
Speaker
I'll give you one more. um From Augustine, we we actually, I'll go ahead and give him a little extra credit here. he sort of expands and deepens this platonic theme that our our minds, maybe I shouldn't call it our minds because they call them souls, but our interior life, let's call it that, is a battleground, right? There's these conflicting wills.
01:09:03
Speaker
And what you have to do is train yourself to, you know, always make it so that the true self is the winner. So I have to mention real quick that there are echoes of Plotinus in here. Remember, Plotinus says that we have to sort of purify ourselves in order to be able to, you know, overcome the illusion that we are a body and realize instead that we are actually already divine.
01:09:28
Speaker
So a lot of Plotinus in here too. But I will say that in Augustine, you know, it's very evident that this eventually, in the Middle Ages, by the way, like centuries later,
01:09:42
Speaker
this sort of you know gets adapted into the practice of confession, right? This looking within and thinking about which of your desires are conducive to uniting you with God and which are driving a wedge between you and God.
01:10:00
Speaker
And so this sort of like interrogating yourself um very rigorously. That comes from Augustine. And it is it is fascinating, right? that This is very much the modern conception of of the self in the West.
01:10:14
Speaker
Many people think of their mind in this way. And we also get ideas of like, you know, our conscience, right? That and we have the ah demon on the right shoulder and the angel on the left. And we're being you know being pulled in two different directions.
01:10:30
Speaker
This is all very Augustinian, right? So that is where Augustine gets a lot of credit. I did want to mention... the sort of uniquely Christian idea here.
01:10:44
Speaker
Because everything I've said so far, um it's possible that you could have seen that eventually in some platonic you know dialogue or tradition. But there is something about this that is extremely Christian. And I want to highlight that now.
01:11:00
Speaker
So here's what that is. And you can read this if you read Augustine's Confessions. Now, earlier I mentioned that Augustine wrote sort of an autobiography.
01:11:12
Speaker
That would be this book called Confessions. And in this book, you can really tell that, you know, first of all, it's written very lucidly. Like you can...
01:11:23
Speaker
really tell how Augustine is you know struggling with himself. And it's you know it's very you know interesting. So for many reasons, this book is interesting. But the thing that I'm going to harp on right now is that you can tell in this book that the way that he came to some of his views is because he's battling with this idea that God, if of course, God is all powerful.
01:11:52
Speaker
And so God can pry his way, effortlessly, I should add, into Augustine's innermost thoughts, right? Every thought that Augustine has is visible to God.
01:12:10
Speaker
And you, of course, don't know anything about God. In fact, you can never know whether you've actually ensured your salvation. It's not until you die and either you're there in front of the pearly gates or you're not.
01:12:25
Speaker
And so what you can really read in Augustine is how God can see all of you and you can never figure out whether or not you're guilty in the eyes of God.
01:12:41
Speaker
And so it is from this, I don't know what you want to call it, paranoia, this tension, this anxiety, that Augustine comes to the conclusion that the only way to secure some kind of rest from this anxiety is to come completely escape from having any moral responsibility. In other words, instead of you know, having the true self and the false self battle it out.
01:13:13
Speaker
Forget the false self. Only be the true self. That way, everything that you do is morally appropriate, morally correct, morally necessary.
01:13:25
Speaker
It's the false self that leads you to do some things that are morally wrong. So the trick is just let go of that false self altogether. And so for Augustine,
01:13:39
Speaker
Virtue is obedience. This is not Aristotle's practical wisdom. Virtue equals obedience.
01:13:52
Speaker
Do not think for yourself. Just obey. That is uniquely Christian for a variety of reasons. You don't get that in pagan philosophy. For starters, there just is no such thing as eternal damnation.
01:14:08
Speaker
And I think it's very telling that it is this... sort of combination of views, right? This dual structure that comes from Plato, along with this idea of an all-powerful God that can see literally everything that's going on inside you.
01:14:24
Speaker
When you put these two together, that's what leads Augustine to develop the self in the way that he did. Fascinating aspect of the history of thought and, you know, sort of fascinating moral psychology going on here. So that's Augustine on the self.
01:15:10
Speaker
Let's move into later Augustine, sometimes called Augustine's mature stage. And I'm going to talk about three things, but they're all interrelated.
Augustine's Shift on Free Will
01:15:20
Speaker
So it's kind of, you know, I'm really always talking about all three of them, but I'm going to focus on one at a time.
01:15:27
Speaker
So those three things are free will, divine grace, and original sin. Here we go. Let's start with free will. And let me begin with this.
01:15:41
Speaker
Historians of philosophy read Augustine, right? And sometimes they get sort of radically different ah interpretations. and They give radically different interpretations.
01:15:54
Speaker
Some people call them compatibilist, which sounds not true to me. Some people call him a libertarian, which sounds true to me. So let me just begin by saying that I'm going to just choose the libertarian interpretation. I think it has the most evidence for it.
01:16:11
Speaker
If you want, you can read this article by Eleanor Stump, where she defends this view about how ah Augustine is a libertarian. The next thing we should cover is what the heck is libertarianism.
01:16:23
Speaker
So I'm going to give you a modern definition of libertarianism, and there will be three clauses, and then I'm going to tell you which to Augustine agrees with. So today, in philosophy, if you are a libertarian, sometimes the label is also known as metaphysical libertarianism, you basically believe that humans do have free will, and those actions that are done out of free will have the following features.
01:16:53
Speaker
First of all, the agent's act is not causally determined by anything outside the agent. In other words, it isn't external forces that acted upon you to make you do some action, take some action. So let's just say that you steal a candy bar.
01:17:14
Speaker
That's very naughty of you. Now, if it was the case that I was controlling you through some kind of, you know, neural implant that I, for some reason, put into you, and I'm the one that made you steal that candy bar, well, that was something outside of you controlling you.
01:17:33
Speaker
So that was not done out of free will. If you... instead had reasoned, you know, your way into into deciding, yeah, you know what, I should steal this candy bar.
01:17:44
Speaker
Well, that would be meeting this first criteria, right? Nothing outside of you caused your action. You did it yourself. That is actually the second criteria we'll talk about.
01:17:57
Speaker
The agent's intellect and will are the ultimate source of the act. In other words, you thought about it and you decided you should do it and then you made yourself do it.
01:18:10
Speaker
Well, there you go. Nothing outside you caused you to act. The act came from within, from you. right. So those are two criteria that are required, according to the libertarian, for an action to be done out of free will.
01:18:26
Speaker
The third one is that the agent can do otherwise. The person doing the thing could have done otherwise. If you were to rewind the tape and put this you know the person in the same situation again, it's possible they could have done something differently.
01:18:44
Speaker
Now, if you believe in certain views about physics where everything that happens has to happen, well, then you don't believe that a person could have done otherwise if you roll back the tape.
01:18:57
Speaker
If, you know, little Timmy steals a candy bar because of, you know, the laws of nature acting on all the atoms in the universe, we can, you know,
01:19:08
Speaker
rewind the tape all you want, but little Jimmy is going to steal that candy bar every single time. According to the libertarian though, that's not true. Agents have a kind of causal power such that if it happened once and you rewind the tape, it doesn't have to happen again.
01:19:27
Speaker
It's possible that agents can do otherwise. So given Augustine's writings, he actually has a work called On Free Choice of the Will.
01:19:39
Speaker
You can tell that ah Augustine agreed with those first two things. First of all, an act can be free as long as it's not caused by anything outside of the person, the agent.
01:19:51
Speaker
and second, act can be the agent's intellect is the source of the action right so augustine clearly believed those things are possible this is unlike for example the stoics as you well know who were determinists and so given all this augustine is clearly some kind of libertarian What I should add here now, sort of adding some nuance from the history of philosophy, is that we can sort of place Augustine on a continuum or maybe on a lineage of thinkers who eventually
01:20:29
Speaker
bring about this idea of libertarian free will. And it starts way before Augustine, maybe 600 years earlier. and With someone like Aristotle, it looks like he was beginning to think about something like a will, but he didn't exactly call it a will yet.
01:20:46
Speaker
And there's books on this. there's theres There's a book literally spelling out the evolution of the idea of the notion of free will. by a guy named Michael Freyda.
01:20:57
Speaker
In any case, Augustine is in this lineage. And so to get to someone like Augustine, you have to go through Aristotle, then probably the Stoics, then probably Philo, actually, maybe.
01:21:10
Speaker
And then eventually to Augustine. So that just adding a little bit of nuance there for you. And okay, so Augustine is a libertarian. So that means we have free will, right?
01:21:22
Speaker
Awesome. No, not quite. Early Augustine did in fact believe that humans had free will. However, and remember I told you I'd give you some more examples as to how Augustine over time grew a little bit more, you know, conservative is the word I've been using.
01:21:42
Speaker
Here is that example, right? So even though younger Augustine believed that we all have free will, Later, Augustine believes that the only person or persons, I guess, that had free will were Adam and Eve.
01:22:01
Speaker
So according to Augustine, in his mature stage, Adam had this free will. But when he sinned, the effect of that sin on Adam was that he suffered a sort of cognitive degradation such that after that point, he was more geared toward sin.
01:22:24
Speaker
In other words, sinning caused him to have less free will. He couldn't resist temptation as much.
01:22:35
Speaker
And that is something he passed on to all of us. Because according to Augustine, this sin, this original sin, is hereditary. We basically get it from birth. And it's sort of like you know our birthright in a way from Adam. We're all part of the lineage creation.
01:22:56
Speaker
stemming back to Adam, we all get it at conception and it has this effect on us. So Augustine actually believes that all humans, after the fall, the fall of Adam and Eve, all of us, we are unable to form ah good volition unless provides cooperates with us in producing it through a divine grace.
01:23:24
Speaker
Let me try that again. in other words, Augustine says that because we have original sin, we can't make ourselves be good. If we want to be good, we have to ask God for help.
01:23:40
Speaker
And God will, if he wants to, send us divine grace. And once we have that grace, then we can be good. Now, that sounds a little twisted. It sounds like, you know, how can you hold us responsible for doing actions when we're predisposed to sinning. That just seems unfair.
01:24:03
Speaker
Well, Augustine says it is perfectly just for God to hold us responsible for sinning, even though we are predisposed to sinning.
01:24:14
Speaker
How is that? Because we can at any moment ask God to strengthen our will to be good. We can basically say to God, hey, I need help. I suck.
01:24:29
Speaker
Help me out. And then God will, it's not guaranteed, but God will hopefully send you grace and then you'll be able to not sin. So because it's always in your power to simply ask, that's why you are rightly held morally responsible if you don't ask for help to not sin.
01:24:52
Speaker
I have here a quote from Augustine on the subject, quote, The soul is charged with guilt not because by nature it lacks knowledge or is incapable but because it did not make an effort to know and because it did not work adequately at acquiring the capability of doing well.
01:25:15
Speaker
Basically, you have to ask for grace. So you can see that we have sort of a diminished free will, according to Augustine.
01:25:27
Speaker
And it is only with grace that we can have something like a fuller free will, right? We need the grace to restore us to the level of free will that Adam had.
01:25:40
Speaker
Now, interestingly, Augustine believes that once we're in heaven, we will have even more free will, even more complete free will. So, you know, I won't get into that here.
01:25:52
Speaker
But that is at least you know some comments on divine grace that it can help you understand what that is. It's sort of this special sauce that takes away some of the negative cognitive effects of sin so that you can have a little bit more free will so that you are capable of choosing good.
01:26:11
Speaker
Now, a lot of questions arise here. And so let me address them now before I move into chatting about original sin in more depth. Here's one that, you know, might come to mind.
01:26:24
Speaker
So we all need help to not sin. Why doesn't God just strengthen everyone so that they are capable of not sinning? and Like, why do we have to ask first? Or maybe how about this?
01:26:41
Speaker
Why doesn't he help us realize that we have to ask? Like, why doesn't God help people see that they need help? Or why doesn't God arrange things so that people will see the need for faith and grace?
01:26:57
Speaker
These are all, you know, questions that sort of overlap a little bit. But why isn't it easier for people to see that they need God's help? And this is one other place where I want to kind of showcase that Augustine gives up on reason.
01:27:13
Speaker
If it were the Stoic philosophers or the Aristotelians or the Platonists, they would provide an answer and they would argue about it. And maybe the next generation would keep the best theories that were developed and keep working on them.
01:27:28
Speaker
That is not what Augustine does. Augustine simply admits that he cannot answer these questions. That means he's just saying, you know, i don't think reason can do it.
01:27:41
Speaker
I don't think reason can help me establish my views. But he refuses to give up those views. In other words, Augustine refuses to give up his conviction that grace is necessary for us to be good, even though he can't argue for the view.
01:28:03
Speaker
So I think that's good evidence that Augustine is giving up on reason. Let's chat now about original sin a bit. Again, we've already been talking about it. These three concepts of free will, divine grace, and original sin are interrelated.
Original Sin and Divine Grace
01:28:23
Speaker
But let me make very clear now that there's three dimensions to sin according to Augustine. First of all, there is the social dimension. And if I can give you the punchline here,
01:28:37
Speaker
It's basically that Augustine is introducing ah new conception of human nature. right He says that we have sin passed on to us in a hereditary way.
01:28:50
Speaker
We're all marred or stained by Adam and Eve's sin, in other words. And thus, we all owe a debt to God. We come out of the box in debt to God.
01:29:04
Speaker
And so for that reason, God is just in punishing all of us. We deserve it. And it's okay that only some are saved through grace.
01:29:16
Speaker
This is why, by the way, Augustine is okay with saying that if an unbaptized baby dies, that baby does go to hell. The baby is born with original sin and there was no time for the baby to get divine grace and and gear himself or herself toward good. And so the baby died in sin and has to go to hell.
01:29:42
Speaker
So that is the social dimension of original sin, right? It's in all of us and we pass it on to each other. in particular, parents pass it on to their children at conception.
01:29:55
Speaker
There is also, as we've already mentioned, the cognitive dimension to sin. Sin degrades us cognitively. And this makes it so that we're more liable to forming sinful habits.
01:30:08
Speaker
We're just, you know, the way I put it is that we're less free We would have been freer had it not been for sin, put another way. And so every single human being after the fall, after Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the forbidden tree, every single one of us is just more prone toward sinning. That is the cognitive dimension of original sin. And there's one more, this theological dimension, because Augustine needs to preserve
01:30:41
Speaker
the idea that God is just. And there is something, even to Augustine, something kind of funny about punishing people, even though they don't have full free will. They have sort of a, you know, half-baked free will.
01:30:59
Speaker
I hope you can see that there's just, you know, there's like a, the way i I put it is there's like a lack of fit that, you know, on the one hand, you're saying God is just. But on the other hand, he's going to punish people who don't completely have free will for not being good.
01:31:18
Speaker
So Augustine was wrestling with this. And his response to this, to his way to solve this puzzle, is to say that, again, at any moment, we can ask for God's grace.
01:31:31
Speaker
And for that reason, we can be held responsible for all those sins that we commit. Because what we should have done is asked for his grace, received it, hopefully, and then started to not do evil.
01:31:47
Speaker
Started to not sin, in other words. So that is how Augustine preserves God's justice. It is once again, divine grace that does all the work.
01:32:02
Speaker
So there are some tidbits of Augustine's theology. i'm going to say that it is arguably coherent. It is not entirely clear that everything checks out perfectly.
01:32:16
Speaker
But at least at face value, OK, it seems to fit together. He gets in all of the main ideas that he wants. Right. So, OK, let's give him that. But.
01:32:28
Speaker
Again, there is something about it where it seems like he's giving up on reason.
Unresolved Questions on Divine Justice
01:32:35
Speaker
There are many unresolved questions here. i want to make sure that's clear.
01:32:40
Speaker
Let me spell some of those out for you now. Here's one. i wrote a couple here. If it is God who gives only to some sinners the grace to be able not to sin, then on what basis does God make this decision?
01:32:58
Speaker
So Augustine himself admits, not everyone gets grace even when they ask for it. Why? Here's another one. Why, if he is all good and all powerful, does God permit things to happen as they did, condemning all humanity for Adam's transgression?
01:33:20
Speaker
Is that really the best setup? So it's that one person commits a sin and then everyone that comes afterward gets that sin too? Like, is there really no better way to do that?
01:33:35
Speaker
Here's another one. Why create humanity if it would only result in most of it being doomed to eternal punishment? That just seems like such a waste.
01:33:48
Speaker
That almost seems cruel, to be honest. How... How does that make any sense? Help me make sense of this, Augustine. Well, unfortunately, Augustine does not help in this regard.
01:34:03
Speaker
In fact, his response is that there are answers to these questions, but that they are most hidden. That is a quote. The word in Latin that he uses is occultissimi.
01:34:20
Speaker
So to close off this lesson, Here is a line from Augustine in his masterwork, City of God. And I want to remind you that Augustine will set the standard for what a good Christian believes for a few centuries at least.
01:34:41
Speaker
And it turns out that what Augustine says is that Reason is not as powerful as a philosopher's thought it was.
01:34:52
Speaker
Sometimes you just have to obey. So here is Augustine responding to someone with all these questions. Why do so many of us have to suffer? Why can't God just give grace to all of us?
01:35:06
Speaker
Why do all of us have to be cognitively degraded by sin? Augustine writes, this was God's decision. A just decree, however inscrutable to us.
01:35:24
Speaker
The closing of the Western mind indeed.