Miss Buddha (92 page)

As I said, where would Aristotle have been
without a Plato to negate?

Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy

From the
4
^th
century BCE—which is about when the classical Greeks bowed
out—to the rise of Christian philosophy in the
4
^th
century CE, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism, and
Neoplatonism were the main philosophical schools in the Western
world.

Interest in natural science declined
steadily over these eight centuries, and these schools concerned
themselves primarily ethics and religion.

These centuries were also a period of
intense intercultural contact, and many Western philosophers were
influenced by ideas brought back from, or encountered by traveling
to, India (Buddhism), Persia (Zoroastrianism), and Palestine
(Judaism).

Epicureanism

In the year 306 BCE, Epicurus founded a
philosophical school in the garden of his Athens home—which is why
his followers became known as philosophers of the garden.

His philosophy adopted the atomistic physics
of Democritus, but he also allowed for an element of chance in the
physical world by postulating that atoms sometimes swerve in
unpredictable ways, and so actually foretelling quantum
physics.

Epicurus’s philosophy aimed to promote human
happiness by removing the fear of death. He further held that
natural science only has value if it can be used to make practical
decisions that help humans achieve the maximum amount of
pleasure—which he then went on to define as “gentle motion and the
absence of pain.”

We know of Epicurus’
teachings primarily through Lucretius’ philosophical poem
De Rerum Natura
(On the
Nature of Things) written in the 1
^st
CE. One could say that
Lucretius singlehandedly resurrected Epicurus, and then popularized
him in Rome.

Stoicism

The Stoic school, which was founded in
Athens around 310 BCE by Zeno of Citium, grew out of the earlier
Cynics movement, which rejected social institutions and material
(worldly) values.

Stoicism grew to become the
most influential school of the Greco-Roman world and produced such
remarkable writers and personalities as the Greek slave and
philosopher Epictetus in the 1
^st
century CE and the
2
^nd
-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was famous for his
wisdom and nobility of character.

Stoicism holds that one can achieve freedom
and tranquility only by rising above and becoming insensitive to
material comforts and external fortune, and by so dedicating
oneself to a life of virtue and wisdom.

The Stoics followed Heraclitus in holding
the primary substance to be fire and in worshiping the Logos, which
they identified with the energy, law, reason, and divine guidance
found throughout nature.

The Stoics also argued that nature was a
system designed by divine beings and they taught that humans should
therefore strive to live in accordance with nature.

The Stoic doctrine that each person is part
of God and that all people form a universal family was instrumental
in breaking down national, social, and racial barriers and so
prepared the way for the spread of Christianity.

The Stoic doctrine of natural law, which
holds that human nature should be the standard for evaluating laws
and social institutions, greatly influenced first Roman, and later
Western law.

Skepticism

The school of Skepticism,
which carried on the Sophists’ criticisms of objective knowledge,
came to dominate Plato’s Academy in the 3
^rd
century BCE. The Skeptics had
discovered, as had Zeno of Elea, logic to be a powerful critical
device, one capable of destroying any positive philosophical view
if used skillfully. And make no mistake, the Stoics were skilled at
it.

Their fundamental assumption, postulate
really, was that humans cannot attain knowledge or wisdom
concerning reality—nothing, in other words, can really be
known.

Based on this the Skeptics concluded that
the way to happiness lies in a complete suspension of judgment,
holding that suspending judgment about the things of which one has
no true knowledge (and one can have no true knowledge about
anything) creates tranquility and fulfillment.

An extreme example of this attitude is the
legend that Pyrrho, one of the most noted of the Skeptics, once
refused to direct his horse to veer as his carriage approached the
edge of a cliff. The carriage had to be diverted by his students,
or he would have perished.

Now, I believe that there is a good word for
that point of view: apathy.

Philo

In the
1
^st
century CE, Philo of Alexandria combined Greek philosophy—
particularly Platonic and Pythagorean ideas—with Judaism in a
system that not only anticipated Neoplatonism, but also Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim mysticism.

Philo held that the true nature of God so
far transcended human understanding and experience as to be
incomprehensible as well as indescribable to man. Still, in
violation of his own assumptions, he tried both to comprehend and
describe, and so outlined the natural world as a series of stages
of descent from God at the pinnacle and the source of all things
good, terminating in matter as the source of evil.

However, he did not seem to have lost much
sleep over the contradiction that matter ultimately sprung from
God, and could therefore not be the source of all evil.

Politically, Philo advocated a religious
state, not unlike those we see today in certain Muslim
countries.

Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism, which at its
peak constituted a true threat to the rise of Christianity, was
founded in the 3
^rd
century CE by Ammonius Saccus and his more famous
disciple Plotinus.

Plotinus based his ideas on the mystical and
poetic writings of Plato, of the Pythagoras, and of Philo. For
Plotinus, the main function of philosophy was to prepare
individuals for the (mystic) experience of ecstasy, in which they
become one with God.

He agreed with Philo that the nature of
God—or the One, as Plotinus called Him—lay beyond rational
understanding, but he disagreed with Philo as to whether or not
humans could experience Him.

The One, the source of all reality, held
Plotinus, could indeed be experienced—for, after all, was this not
God experiencing Himself?

Plotinus saw a universe emanating from the
One through a mysterious process of divine energy cascading down
successive levels.

The highest of these level
formed a trinity constituting firstly
the
One
; then
the
Logos
, which contained the Platonic Forms;
and lastly
the World
Soul
, which in turn gave rise to human
souls and natural forces.

The farther down this cascading creation you
looked, the more imperfect and evil those creations, all the way
down to pure matter.

For Plotinus, the highest goal of life was
to purify oneself of dependence on bodily comforts and, through
philosophical meditation, to prepare oneself for an ecstatic
reunion with the One (a goal he indeed shared with not only the
Hindu Yogi, but also many Buddhists, and later on, the Christian
Mystics).

Medieval Philosophy

By the
3
^rd
century CE, Christianity had spread to the more educated
classes of the Roman Empire and the powerful fathers of the new
church set about to combine the teachings of the Gospels with the
philosophical concepts of the Greek and Roman schools.

Thus, as the Greco-Roman civilization began
its long decline, so did Western philosophy, as its practitioners
more and more turned their attention from scientific investigation
of nature in search of worldly happiness to the fresh Christian
problem of salvation in another and better world.

Of particular importance in this evolution
were the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and the Council of
Ephesus in 431, which both drew upon the metaphysical ideas of
Aristotle and Plotinus to establish important (though very
man-made) Christian doctrines about the divinity of Jesus and the
nature of the Trinity.

Augustinian Philosophy

The process of reconciling
the Greek accent on reason with the religious fervor found in the
teachings of Christ and the apostles found a very eloquent
expression in the writings of Saint Augustine during the late
4
^th
and
early 5
^th
centuries.

In the end, Saint Augustine had succeeded in
formulating a new system of thought that, through subsequent
amendments and elaborations (again, all human-made and mostly
artificial), eventually became the authoritative doctrine of the
ever more firmly established new Christian religion.

By the musings of Saint
Augustine, Christian thought then remained quite Platonic in spirit
up until the 13
^th
century, when Aristotelian philosophy grew
dominant.

Augustine had argued that religious faith
and philosophical understanding are complementary rather than
opposed and that one must “believe in order to understand and
understand in order to believe.”

And, like the Neoplatonists, he had
considered the soul a higher form of existence than the body and
taught that true knowledge can only be gained in the contemplation
of Platonic ideas as abstract notions apart from sensory experience
and anything physical or material.

He then combined this Platonic philosophy
with the Christian concept of a personal God who created the world
and predestined its course, and with the doctrine of humanity’s
fall, requiring divine intervention through incarnation in
Christ.

Augustine also attempted to gain a rational
understanding of the relation between divine predestination and
human freedom—which, of course, constitutes an inherent
contradiction—and of the existence of evil in a world created by a
perfect and all-powerful God.

He never really achieved his goal, and late
in life Augustine arrived at a rather pessimistic view about
original sin, grace, and predestination: the ultimate fates of
humans, he decided, are predetermined by God in the sense that some
people are granted divine grace to enter heaven and others are not,
and human actions and choices cannot explain the fates of
individuals.

Augustine conceived of history as a dramatic
struggle between the good in humanity, as expressed in loyalty to
the “City of God,” or community of saints, and the evil in
humanity, as embodied in the earthly city with its material values.
This led to his rather pessimistic view of human life, which
asserted that happiness is impossible in the world of the living,
where even with good fortune, which is rare, awareness of
approaching death would mar any tendency toward satisfaction.

He further believed that without the
religious virtues of faith, hope, and charity, which require divine
grace to be attained, a person cannot develop the natural virtues
of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom.

Pessimistic or not, these
views held sway throughout the Middle Ages and became even more
important during the Reformation of the 16
^th
century when it inspired the
doctrine of predestination put forth by Protestant theologian John
Calvin.

Other Medieval Philosophers

Saint Augustine was so influential, that one
can only map a few major contributors to Western thought in the
centuries following his death in 430 CE.

One such contributor,
however, was the 6
^th
-century Roman statesman
Boethius who revived interest in Greek and Roman philosophy,
particularly in Aristotle’s logic and metaphysics.

Another contributor was the
9
^th
century Irish monk John Erigena, who developed a pantheistic
interpretation of Christianity, identifying the divine Trinity with
the One, Logos, and World Soul of Neoplatonism and maintained that
both faith and reason are necessary to achieve the ecstatic union
with God.

Perhaps even more
significant to the eventual rising of a new Western philosophy was
the early 11
^th
-century Muslim philosopher
Avicenna. His work modified the Aristotelian metaphysics by
introducing a distinction between essence (the fundamental
qualities that make a thing what it is—the tree-ness of a tree, for
example) and existence (being, or living reality). He also
demonstrated how it is possible to combine the biblical view of God
with Aristotle’s philosophical system.

Scholasticism

As a result of the now
increasing contact between different parts of the Western world and
the general reawakening of cultural interests that later culminated
in the Renaissance, the 11
^th
century began to see a
revival of philosophical thought.

The works of Plato, Aristotle, and other
Greek thinkers were translated by Arab scholars and brought to the
attention of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophers in Western
Europe who then interpreted and clarified these writings in an
effort to reconcile philosophy with religious faith and to provide
rational grounds for their religious beliefs. Their labors
established the foundations of Scholasticism.