Requiem for Philosophy

Religion (1998) 28, 41–64

Requiem for Philosophy D G Composing his obituary for Rome’s antiquity, in his City of God Augustine proclaimed that ancient philosophy had perished, too. In casting history in this fashion, Augustine’s funereal obloquy helped bury philosophy, as the ancients once had lived it from Socrates to Stoicism. In this essay, Augustine’s requiem for philosophy is examined, with a view toward suggesting what philosophy would have to become in order to meet the spiritual requirements Augustine found it sorely lacked. ? 1998 Academic Press Limited

But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death. Revelation 21.8

History has its moments. Culture, context, circumstance notwithstanding, sometimes events defy the times. Then interpreters begin to tell their stories, to stay the moment and re-construct its situating context. The moment yields to narrative placement. Happenstance defers to portraiture and reconstruction. Interpreters angle for perspective and vie with one another to define the times. Even the ancient history of philosophy is a never-ending story. Sometimes stories told on the spur of the moment affect subsequent history. The sack of the eternal city in 410 brought an end to Rome’s antiquity. Composing his obituary for that earthly empire, Augustine welcomed the death of a civilization he loathed so eloquently. In his City of God, Augustine proclaimed that ancient philosophy had perished too, along with false gods and pornographic circuses. In casting history in this fashion, Augustine’s funereal narration helped bury philosophy, as the ancients once had lived it from Socrates to Stoicism. The ancient sages had insisted that philosophy requires personal commitment. According to Augustine’s reading of the sack of Rome, the demise of antiquity discredited the philosophical life. Displaced by Judaeo-Christianity, ancient philosophy was no longer viable as a living practice. Its superannuated corpse became, instead, a reliquary of arguments and theses. Augustine welcomed its demise and welcomed in scholasticism. This self-fulfilling death notice is worth considering, since what little that remains of philosophy as a practiced way of life has nearly vanished in the West. Even history’s relics of philosophy’s heroes have been primarily contained in memorialized remains relegated to mausoleums housed in assorted colleges and universities. There are few Western philosophers who practice their profession outside education’s havens, not to mention pursue philosophy as a way of life, as Socrates once did and as Confucians continue to do.1 Augustine’s requiem for philosophy continues in effect, especially in the aftermath of a Renaissance that tried and failed to revive philosophy as a way of life. Faced with premillennial anxieties, respected cynics like Richard Rorty have written fresh obituaries of the philosophical profession2 Postmodern Miltonists like Stanley Fish invoke the Manichaean specter of chthonic, inchoate Evil at war with forces of the Lite, in a battle of faith and slogans, wars of words.3 Philosophy is dead again. Unlike its ancient history and unlike its Renaissance revival, today’s professors of philosophy are not players anymore wherever issues really matter. From public policy to 0048–721X/98/010041+24 $25.00/0/rl970079

? 1998 Academic Press Limited

42 D. Glidden private morality, the voices of influence and decision making are not that of professionally trained philosophers but rather that politicians, lawyers, clergy, scientists, not to mention pundits talking off their heads on camera. Formalized philosophical theories of reality appear hopelessly naive and politically pointless, much to the sardonic amusement of those who must take their living from the world. Perhaps the stakes are nowadays held to be too high to rely upon the reasoning of professorial technicians, forever quibbling with one another, incessantly disputing their own invented terms. Augustine launched this same complaint fifteen hundred years ago. Assessing ancient history, Augustine concluded that philosophy proved impotent when it came to connecting with reality, saving souls, effectual decision making. Or else perhaps by saying so, Augustine may have guaranteed the truth of what he said. Because of the historical hegemony of Judaeo-Christianity, Augustine’s angled interpretation may be itself circumstantially to blame for the death of ancient philosophy as it was practiced since the days of Socrates. Yet Augustine’s requiem continues to remain resonant because something like Augustine’s pessimism toward philosophy prevails powerfully today. Once upon a time politicians, such as Pericles, Alexander and Augustus, were conversant with philosophy. Sometimes statesmen were philosophers themselves, like Solon, Cicero and Marcus. It was once commonly assumed that just as physicians were considered experts for the body, so philosophers were skilled sages, respected as professional therapists for the psyche and society. Those times have passed. Augustine’s influential requiem for antiquity may have had a lot to do with their demise. Then again perhaps the dead deserved their fate, Seneca at the hands of his pupil Nero. Augustine thought philosophy itself had failed, just as Rome deserved the sack. Augustine’s pessimism spoke from his sense of history. He contrasted the collapse of antiquity to a studied optimism for the future of humanity. Albrecht Dihle describes Augustine as the first philosophical anthropologist, and so it is not surprising that Augustine plays a central role in Charles Taylor’s magisterial study of the emerging modern sense of self-identity.4 Taylor’s suggestion seems to be that Augustine’s image of the inner human psyche empowered individual identity, freeing individuals from any biological or social need to belong to species, tribe, or nation. In this way the individual took precedence over any merely mortal form of community, breaking with an earthly world and a local society which would structure and control individuality. According to the story that Augustine told about antiquity, one that Taylor bought and sold as a source of our modernity, the individual was saved from the inevitable dying of society. The good of individuality counter-posed itself against the evils of earthly communities, as individual autonomy was rescued from Roman ruins. By contrast, the practical orientation of ancient philosophy had long functioned as a social cement bonding the happiness of persons to the well-being of the state. Philosophy had served to keep persons constrained by the values of the communities in which they lived. A shared sense of shame, a common sense of right and wrong, were derived from the community, albeit articulated and refined by philosophical analysis.5 Such was the legacy of Plato’s Laws, Aristotle’s polity, Cicero’s res publica, or, for that matter, even an Epicurean gated community of friends or the Stoics’ global village. By severing the bond between the person and society, Augustine’s emphasis on individuality destroyed the practical value of what once had been ancient philosophy’s singular contribution to the social fabric of community. Playing fast and loose with the words of Genesis,6 Augustine was fond of pointing out that man was first created by himself alone, unlike the animals, who were paired off

Requiem for Philosophy 43 interdependently from their biological beginning.7 So, Augustine argued, man was truly made in God’s own solitary image, and not as the social animal Aristotle famously made him out to be. The only community humanity was destined to be part of was a contemplative community contemplating God in the company of angels. The human home was Heaven, not an earthly society of cities or nations. For Augustine, individual autonomy afforded an alternative to societal involvement, just as Judaeo-Christian worship spurned pagan philosophical practices. When compared with Augustine’s heavenly city of God, the practical wisdom of the ancients was decidedly down to earth and socially oriented, responding to the requirements of a contemporaneous community. Whether it be a circle of friends, the polis or the current state of nature, moral sages were supposed to be responsive to a wider social network. The ancients’ philosophical commitments required acting out in public a daily discipline, aiming at happiness on earth. For the most part, mortal life was not conceived as a life of preparation, waiting on some future sabbatical in heaven for days of perfect contemplation. Like politics, all morality was local, even when attuned with nature. Augustine’s obituary for antiquity proved devastating for the living practice of philosophy. Yet, what would a philosophy be like which might withstand Augustine’s criticisms? We shall explore this question, once we take a closer look at Augustine’s requiem for the late, great ancient philosophers.

Dead on Arrival Unlike individual plants and animals, each and every human being was said by Christianity to be eternal, once created. Had Adam and Eve not sinned, Augustine reassures his readers, they would have continued living happily in Eden. Instead, Adam and Eve were cast out from Eden into a world of hard labor, earthly adversity, despair, inevitable bodily decay. With sin came death. The good news of Christianity afforded redemption and resurrection for the dead, admission to another form of Eden. With earthly death came everlasting bliss. Dying proved a necessity for living, our present life a race towards death, to win eternity in a second Eden.8 Not all deserve a second life. Those who fail terrestrial tests of character, who remain in a wilful state of sin during their temporal mortality, do not deserve eternity in Paradise. Sinners must die again. Just as the earthly body dies when the soul, as its principle of life, abandons it, so the soul and the body die together, when God abandons a soul flawed by sin. Such was the early Christian doctrine of second death, or mors secunda.9 Jesus apparently had promised that all humanity would come bodily alive again after the resurrection of the dead. Individual human existence could never be extinguished then. Even sinners would be reincarnated. So the doctrine of second death required nuancing: the sinner’s soul somehow survives and eternally resides in its new body, not strongly enough to make the body come actively alive, but sufficiently enough so that the sinner suffers. Otherwise the penalty of sin proved harmless: namely, the dreamless sleep of nonexistence. Augustine reasoned that, the soul is insensate without body. It cannot feel pain or grief without a body to experience, say, the agony of burning. Souls of sinners consequently required bodies, but only in order to experience eternal pain and suffering, as the penalty for sin. Unlike mortal flesh, these bodies would prove indestructible, fire and brimstone notwithstanding. Here Augustine appealed to the lowly case of salamanders, whom every ancient knew survive the burning of the log piles they live within.10 Interpreting the Book of Revelation, Augustine insisted that second death required that sinners’ souls remain alive, but not enough to live a life the way the saved would savor

44 D. Glidden Paradise. The life of the damned would only be livable enough to feel pain, instead of pleasure. And the damned would suffer for eternity.11 So Augustine’s sense of Christianity echoed ancient fables of ghosts in Hades, providing zombies of its own invention, sanctified by the words of Revelation. There would always be this other place where dead souls eternally eked out a miserable existence, like Sisyphus and Tantalus before them. Prominent among the zombies were dead philosophers. It is worth considering in some detail what it was about actual philosophical practices which proved fatal to philosophers and damned them for eternity, according to Augustine. But before we dissect the specific sins of the ancient philosophers’ pathologies, it is worth considering what had infected their philosophies in general, lest Augustine’s God appear unjust, condemning ancient sages to a second passing even prior to the birth of Christ. Like Adam and Eve before them, knowledge as a private, privileging possession seduced philosophers.12 But philosophy could have chosen otherwise. Augustine turned to Platonism to reveal the path philosophers could and should have taken, for no school had come closer to Christianity than Platonists.13 It was they who were the first philosophers to recognize God was the author of all things, the illuminator of truth (veritatis inlustrator), the bestower of happiness. Or so Augustine claimed. But the central value of the Platonists, from Augustine’s point of view, lay in their view of human understanding. The Platonists, as Augustine read them, had insisted that genuine wisdom was luminous in character. This required the capacity of the mind to see reality directly, a mind’s eye, as it were. And that, in turn, revealed the necessity of divine intervention to enable humankind to see with the divine light of mental vision.14 Without divine illumination, the mind could see nothing, relying only on guesswork from the senses. Without God’s love, the mind’s eye stayed blind, reason useless. The later Platonists, Augustine claimed, acknowledged this, though suggestions of this doctrine also could be found, Augustine thought, in Plato’s writings.15 The capacity of the mind to apprehend what was hidden to the senses, to recognize the intelligible structures of reality, required an ability to see with another sort of vision what was hidden from our eyes. Animals could not achieve this, lacking an incorporeal capacity to see beyond their sense impressions. Although this capacity for visual thinking was present in humanity, it required the gift of God’s illumination to spark its vision. God’s love of human souls ignited a fire in the mind, so to speak.16 This inner light could in turn illuminate the darkness of the reality surrounding us, enabling us to see the nature of the earthly world we were living in and to recognize another world we were destined for. According to this Platonic model of luminous knowledge, the mind’s eye was somewhat like the famed lighthouse at Pharos near Alexandria. And especially for the later Platonists whom Augustine read so eagerly, this inner light within the mind was said to be a loving gift from God, not some mythic fire stolen by Prometheus, not some technical accomplishment of man’s invention. Once the light was lit, it enabled the mind to see what the senses could not fathom. Armed with the power of such second sight, the self could see reality directly. Although acquiring wisdom depended on igniting the inner light of mind, the mind was not required to look only within its soul for insight. The Platonists did not put blinders on mental vision and restrict it to the self-reflection of one’s own psyche. Indeed, far from turning inward, it was the natural function of the mind to shine outward upon reality, extending as far as the light might penetrate experiential darkness, extending all the way to Heaven and the Source of illumination. What mattered

Requiem for Philosophy 45 crucially to the Platonists, and to Augustine’s use of them, was how the mind’s eye hungered for the light and was fixated upon it, the way a moth flies to the flame, the way a child seeks mother’s love. From the viewpoint of mere animals, this yearning for illumination was a mystery which entirely escaped them. According to Augustine, acknowledging the compelling joy of mental insight together with its source as a gift of divine love set the Platonists apart from all the other ancient philosophers. Aristotle, Epicureans, the Stoics, and so many other lesser sects and schools all had focused on the self as the means to happiness. One way or another, it was for the sake of self that the final end was given, and this perspective made the summum bonum human. Whether happiness was solely a function of the psyche or the well-being of the body or some combination of the two, perhaps incorporating external goods of fate and fortune too, these other ancients thought the mind turned back inward on its self and toward its own satisfaction, as the measure of how to live a life and what to choose. But for Plato, as Augustine read him, the measure of a life was instead the love of God, since God is the source of light and the mind’s illumination.17 Consequently, for the Platonists, the only true and supreme good of man is God, and for this Augustine praised them. Except for the Platonists, all the other leading ancient philosophies were self-centered instead of God-centered, Augustine claimed. This difference carried over into epistemology as well. Most other ancient models of knowledge had been logocentric, instead of visual. Taking the Epicureans and the Stoics as examples, what they claimed to know in their thoughts, words and doctrines was based entirely upon assessment of their sense impressions. Even Aristotle seemed to go along with this. The self inspected its own impressions and then formulated hypotheses about sources in the world. Sensory impressions remained the basis of such knowledge, and so all knowledge consisted of interpretation.18 Assessing appearances was the analytical work of individual logos, or reason. Consequently, knowledge took the form of hypotheses, definitions, propositions, statements, sentences. Knowledge took the form of words. And words were always open to disputes, competing definitions and contrary interpretations, not to mention the vagaries of experience which generated such logoi in the first place. In this way, the self remained the fulcrum of knowledge, just as it had in ethics. Circumstantial vagaries of impressionistic experience and the competition of hypothesizing predetermined what most philosophies understood by reality, yielding what Augustine derided as futility and vanity.19 The Platonists proved to be exceptions to prevailing logocentrism, because they took genuine knowledge to be luminous in character, thanks to the Light outside us and within. Truth was intersubjectively visible, being something seen, not something said. And so the Platonists escaped the fate of skepticism, which had demolished the other ancient schools by pitting competing interpretive doctrines against each other, seizing on the capriciousness of experience and the vagaries of language. According to Augustine, God’s love enables us to recognize reality directly, without the mediation of impressions, hypotheses and interpretations. The Platonists came closest to realizing this. Properly prepared and motivated, any human soul could break out of the conventions of competing discourse and witness reality directly with the eye of mind. Ultimately, the soul could see God.20 So the love of God replaced the love of words, arguments and definitions, just as it replaced the love of self. Notwithstanding disagreements with the Platonists, Augustine agreed with them on this.21 Even so, it was failure of character, not epistemic error, that made the ancient philosophers vulnerable to second death. In order for the mind to see the light, first it

46 D. Glidden had to struggle away from the competitive earthly politics of divisive philosophies competing for hegemony in some civic Cave. What was required was to escape the Cave entirely and face the love of God directly. The mind needed to turn itself away from evaluating its own experiences in terms of artifactual philosophical vocabularies and be open to luminous insight, which knew no privileged discourse (no authoritative ‘I’). The soul’s calling was to recognize reality purely with the eye of mind. In order to achieve insight, the mind first had to be receptive to love God and to seek the sort of visual knowledge God’s illumination empowered in the soul. It took character to do this, in particular the virtue of humility. And it was this particular virtue which the ancients found missing from the orbits of their self-centered philosophies.22 It certainly was not itself a sin that the ancients made philosophy a way of life, a living practice, a personal commitment. Their sin lay in the logocentric practices they engaged in. Instead of looking to the Light, most ancient philosophers looked to themselves to get things right, employing privileging vocabularies of their own invention, with the exception of the Platonists, who looked to God instead. Being open to divinely inspired insight required humility. It required putting the pride of particular claims aside, abandoning obsession with exacting definitions, controlling conceptions and particular propositional formulations concocted in debates of scholars against rivals. It required acknowledging the illuminating character of divinely directed vision over efforts to fix the truth in words which privileged the formulations of one school or scholar over others. Humility had been conspicuously missing as a virtue from ancient lists of qualities of character. Among the Latin moralists familiar to Augustine, humilitas had been considered not a virtue but at best a condition of ill fortune, often conveying appalling connotations of lowliness, self-debasement, subservience, servility.23 More important, humility proved conspicuously missing from ancient philosophic practices, which were characteristically mean-spirited when engaged competitively against one another in wars of words that took no prisoners. Arguments became signatures for schools; ideas came identified with their designer’s labels. Philosophy turned into a contest of victors over losers, where personal invective became a favored form of refutation.24 Humiliation was far more common than humility. Even Socrates enjoyed humiliating whomever he had words with. Being open to the Light required a lowliness of heart, a meekness of the mind. Humility required a lowering of expectations and anticipations, so as to bear witness to reality, as opposed to matching what one was about to see with the mind’s own preconceptions. Humility was slow to speak and quick to listen.25 It required the capacity to be surprised by the joy of insight. It demanded the silence of recognition, not listening for ready confirmation of one’s own opinions. Humility abjured any effort to control or take ownership for whatever one might discover, since anything and everything the mind could see was God’s. Augustine was convinced that ancient philosophers would pay a heady price for the pride of their convictions, once they spurned humble sensitivity toward the inner light of mind ever present in them since creation. By extinguishing the light of mind their souls turned into zombies, and God withdrew illuminating love in response to their rejection of the Light, acknowledging and conceding these mortals’ sorry preference for the Cave. Like Oedipus, ancient philosophers had wilfully blinded themselves and had only themselves to blame. Once philosophers turned into logocentrics, they had become obsessed with competitive debating practices and winning arguments for their favored theses. Philosophies became

Requiem for Philosophy 47 extensions of egos. Their earthly Cave became, in Augustine’s words, ‘a City of Confusion indifferently housing philosophers with differing opinions competing among themselves’.26 Elsewhere Augustine famously compared this city of philosophical confusion with the infamy of Babylon.27 Augustine had little doubt philosophers were deserving of their destiny. Their souls revealed themselves to be virtually deceased, distended by pride, blind to reality. They died to die again.

The Demise of Philosophy as a Way of Life A Babylon of Differences Augustine assembled his bill of particulars against philosophers by borrowing extensively from Varro’s works on religion and philosophy. In Concerning Philosophy, Varro had examined the history of ancient moral theory and meticulously calculated the various philosophical permutations summing up the summum bonum, human purpose and the distinctive character of human happiness. Reckoning his calculations by adding up the different possibilities among competing philosophies, Varro concluded that ancient philosophers afforded 288 separate versions of the good life. Setting the other competitors aside, Varro reverted to the original recipe of Plato’s, a view with which Augustine was sympathetic.28 But in the course of presentation Varro made ancient philosophy appear futile and foolish. Moral truth, one would expect, ought to yield unanimity instead of a spectacle of would-be sages competing with one another in incessant disagreement. Philosophical pluralism proved especially embarrassing for those who would act on their philosophy as if it were the true and only recipe for living. By the time Augustine composed his obituary for ancient philosophy, nine hundred years or so had passed since Anaximander first wrote about the justice of the cosmos and Parmenides had compared the way things were with the way things seemed to be. Heraclitus, Empedocles and Democritus had each tried their hands at moral philosophy. Socratic dialectic had been invented, followed by various Socratic schools, Cyrenaic hedonists, early Pyrrhonists. Plato had founded his Academy, Aristotle the Lyceum; Cynics, Epicureans, and Stoics had established themselves as well. Centuries then followed of exacting philosophic erudition, interaction, and contention, from Athens to Rome, India to Spain, from France and Britain to North Africa and Alexandria. Yet, there had been no resolution even of the summum bonum question. Philosophical differences multiplied instead of narrowed. After nearly a thousand years had passed, consensus never came. Surely, philosophy as it had first conceived itself had failed and failed dismally, Augustine concluded. With 288 varietals, it is no wonder that philosophy as a living way of life appeared to be an idle or idyllic exercise. Those who sought the summum bonum and then attempted to live the life which their particular philosophy mandated would undoubtedly appear foolish to 287 other points of view; the life they chose would seem in vain, a false attempt at happiness. The competing presence of so many sects and schools suggested that philosophy could never find the way. The very presence of such competition easily effaced the claim that philosophers were experts of the psyche and the polis. To agnostics of philosophy and to the general populace who simply followed the customs of the country, any particular philosophic way of life became just another lifestyle. In the aftermath of its first millennium, philosophers looked more like the sophists they had vainly distanced themselves from. Augustine saw philosophical pluralism as the visible sign of a fatal decision to turn away from witnessing the way things were (de rebus ipis). The ancients proudly preferred

48 D. Glidden to debate what their rivals had to say about reality, instead (de hominibus quid quisque senserit scire).29 Cults of personalities and school rivalries resulted in metaphysical misprision. From Augustine’s viewpoint, philosophers had wrongly taken the world they were living in to be the entire grounding of their being, in this way falling victim to self-centered orientation. Except for the Platonists, philosophers had not recognized the cleavage between here and eternity. Ancient philosophers continuously misidentified the material Cave where they happened to be dwelling with Reality entirely. Even Stoic adoration of the divine cosmos yielded to the particular house of blues they happened to be living in. With the exception of the Platonists, the surviving ancient philosophies contemporary with Augustine continued to seek happiness on earth and vainly tried to discover the summum bonum through efforts of their own invention, which required competing against one another for some life-defining, death defying, obsessively compelling, ever-changing slogan. Augustine especially condemned the Stoics for their pretense as they attempted to portray as the best of possibilities what they themselves often admitted to be the fated misery of mortal existence, part and parcel of the inscrutable justice of an indifferent cosmos.30 Augustine’s derision of the Stoics might appear surprising since the Stoics regarded the cosmos as the heavenly home of humanity and the contemplation of divinity to be the proper work of humankind. Indeed, Augustine’s operating distinction in his City of God between the Earthly and the Heavenly Cities acquired its provenance from early Stoicism, in addition to Platonism.31 Yet the Stoics made earthly existence a synchronous continuum with the cosmos, whereas Augustine saw heaven and earth as rivals in time and space. Worst of all, the Stoics understood divinity to be material. That, Augustine couldn’t countenance. So the materialist Epicureans were entirely excluded from consideration, Stoics treated with disdain.32 Stoic philosophers in particular had sought to manufacture for themselves a ‘counterfeit’ form of human happiness which Augustine condemned as ‘fraudulence and arrogance.’33 As an indication of their sorry state of mind, suicide was something Stoics were continually looking forward to – an indicative manifestation of philosophical depression Augustine found so clinically horrifying.34 From Augustine’s point of view, our entire material existence is an exercise in vanity, birth and death included, notwithstanding fate, fortune and the Stoic’s allegedly beneficent deity.35 Instead of contriving to find false happiness somewhere within the wretchedness of mortality by dwelling in the Stoics’ material reality, another life, another world and another God entirely proved to be the one and only summum bonum for Augustine and the early Christians. Augustine insisted on deferring the possibility of happiness until a second lifetime. In doing so he provided his own biblical justification, explaining why secular philosophy had proven futile, since human happiness could never be achieved while living on this planet anyway. And this made philosophy as a practiced way of life an idle exercise, since mortal human life simply wasn’t worth investing in as if it were an end in itself. In its stead, Augustine offered a religious discipline of ascetic preparation, making philosophical ethics otiose. The consequences of Augustine’s deference to another world and a second life have proven to be nearly fatal for the living practice of philosophy in the West. At the same time, it is important to distinguish Augustine’s condemnation of ancient philosophy from his own biblical expectation of life in Paradise. It had been precisely the ancient philosophic promise to advance a way of life on earth that would distinguish its practitioners from sophists and rhetoricians, who were said to be only in it for the words

Requiem for Philosophy 49 and the wealth their eloquence might command. Yet the promise of philosophy had never been redeemed. Philosophers had spent nearly a thousand years trying to reveal the human summum bottom and to practice living it, but philosophy failed to discover it or live it. Notwithstanding biblical eschatology, philosophy itself committed suicide. It must have been embarrassing for Stoics living centuries after Zeno and Chrysippus when the sage whom they were counting on as the messiah of their moral system never once materialized. It must have been discomfiting to see Cynics make such public fools of themselves in the name of Socrates. It was certainly disconcerting to see the Epicureans revere the founder of the Garden as if he himself were god, materialist and closet atheist as Epicurus had been. The controversies among so many different ancient views and schools never went away. Clarity had never come concerning how to live a life on earth. Philosophy as a lifestyle proved futile. Perhaps it would not have been so distressing had the philosophers merely presented arguments and never promised they would practice what they preached. Sophistry had a long established audience in antiquity, where speeches and arguments entertained educated classes who favored verbal combat over gladiatorial displays of violence. Instead, philosophers claimed to find a means for happiness. They offered 288 varieties on the theme of living life, but not one had proved viable enough to reveal the human summum bonum. Consequently, Augustine thought he had every reason to condemn the legacy of the great ancient philosophers as an exercise in vanity. Unlike Protagoras the sophist, no respected ancient philosopher had ever seriously maintained there might be different final goods and different philosophic systems, each as true and valuable as some others. Each thought his philosophic system made all the difference. Theirs was the winner, all the others losers. History proved each to be a failure, and so they failed all together.

False Pieties Augustine also questioned the religious lives that philosophers had led.36 Except for occasional dyspeptic remarks about Homeric deities by philosophers like Xenophanes, there had never been an ancient tradition dividing religion from philosophy.37 The existence of deities and daimones occupied an unquestioned presence in ancient metaphysics. Philosophers all had their gods and worshipped them. The practice of religion was part and parcel of Pythagoreanism. With his dying breath Socrates ordered a cock be sacrificed to Asclepius. Plutarch the Platonist worshipped with devotion as a priest at Delphi. Even Epicureans felt compelled to explain how peculiar atomic clusters might appear as gods to mortals. Philosophers tried to render divinity understandable. Yet philosophers’ deities proved as unreliable and unworthy as their values. Using another work of Varro’s,38 Augustine argued that the natural or cosmological systems of the great ancient philosophers had been invariably compromised by attempts to implement their theories in daily religious rituals. Philosophers believed in gods because metaphysical convictions required them. Philosophers endorsed religious rituals precisely because their philosophies insisted upon acting on the knowledge of divinity. Such knowledge soon embraced odd daimones, false pieties. Philosophy as an expression of metaphysical devotion became entrapped by mythology and superstition. Philosophers worshipped gods as fabulous as any of the vulgar prayed to: a ludicrous litany of divinities for every natural or bodily function, gods of high tide and of low tide, a god for passing gas.39 Over the centuries, philosophers exhibited peculiar devotions. This history proved embarrassing, given the pretension of the practitioners for wisdom.

50 D. Glidden The Stoics, for example, took religious piety seriously, as a mandatory virtue for living the good life.40 Given their commitment that the world we were living in was our only ground of being, Stoic piety required converting the Stoic’s cosmological view of divinity into local, daily practices. The Stoics, to be sure, distinguished civic religion from superstition, but the difference became obscured when it came to specific religious acts.41 Early Stoics such as Zeno had seemed sympathetic to the anti-conventionalism of Cynics, who were notoriously irreverent toward established religion.42 In time, however, Stoics turned conservative and wedded their philosophical theology of a cosmic divinity to the civic religions of their own particular communities, as a means of inculcating the virtue of piety into daily life. In this way, sophisticated ancient philosophers themselves promoted pagan demons and peculiar divinities commonly worshipped in public ceremonies. Such contrived expressions of piety proved as false as seeking happiness on earth. Hence Augustine complained that it greatly mattered that we worship ‘the true and truly holy divinity’ for the sake of a truly happy eternal life and not for the sake of the transitory vapor of mortality (mortalis vitae transitorium vaporem).43 In attempting to demonstrate piety, Stoicism revealed considerable dishonesty. This was an especially troubling feature for a philosophical system which had placed such stress on honestas, or moral rectitude, as a way of life. Yet this same hypocrisy could be found in nearly all the ancient philosophies. In order to practice what they preached, many ancient philosophers went along with local cults they privately found vulgar and misleading, in the same way in which a contemporary of Augustine might attend mass out of abstract conviction and only mouth the credo. So Seneca mocked and ridiculed the inroads myths had made into Rome’s religion, in his now lost treatise On Superstition. At the same time, Seneca acted out religious rituals, even when he did not personally believe in them. ‘As long as we remember that such worship pertains to custom more than fact’, it does not really matter.44 Seneca’s avowal of hypocrisy was memorialized by Augustine’s now famous description of him: ‘He worshipped what he despised, did what he denounced, adored what he found fault with’. Augustine continued: ‘Yet in support of the laws and customs of men, though he did not take the part of an actor in the theatre, philosophy taught him to imitate that actor in the temple’. And this pretense Augustine found particularly despicable: ‘That was the more reprehensible in that he played his lying part in such a way that the people thought he was acting honestly, whereas an actor on the stage plays rather to amuse the people than to deceive them by deception’.45 To complete his condemnation, Augustine cited Seneca’s silence on the Christians and Seneca’s explicit slander of Jewish religious practices. Seneca ridiculed and despised precisely those whom God had taken as the chosen people, to prepare the way for Christianity.46 In committing such a sacrilege, Seneca stood as a convenient symbol for all that had gone wrong with Stoic piety and, for that matter, the religions of philosophers in general. What mattered, Augustine insisted from the beginning of his treatise, was to pick out whom (or what) you would worship, or tend to (eligite quem colatis!).47 Augustine expressed this sentiment in Latin terms borrowed from agriculture – cultivating the land and picking plants from the soil; whether they be crops or weeds, reap what you would sow. The ancient philosophers for the most part, one way or another, chose living in this world as the cherished focal point of human interest. Even their religious commitments were oriented around this mortal life, a commitment to the civic community and its divinities. From Augustine’s point of view, they should have spurned this world entirely and worshipped the Judaeo-Christian God instead. Philosophy as a

Requiem for Philosophy 51 personal, living piety proved misguided since human devotion ought to be directed towards a different world entirely than the civic or even global village. Augustine’s biblical other worldliness may have readily disposed of philosophical paganism, but it is worth considering Augustine’s criticisms independently of the faith Augustine had. For the Stoics in particular, religion had been a required expression of civic humanism. Religion provided an opportunity for demonstrating piety. Religion in turn derived from philosophical first principles, rather than the other way around. So Seneca observed civic religion with acquiescence. His religious pieties were acted out as an expression of civic virtue and cosmic reverence more than any inner faith in Rome’s particular divinities, to whom he only appeared to dedicate his conscience. Augustine objected that ancient philosophy ought to be able to express its spirituality in daily life without having to make a pretense of virtue. At the same time, those few philosophers who, like the early Stoics or the Epicureans, who acted on genuine religious convictions faced the ridicule endured by Cynics who abjured conventions and by acting directly on their core beliefs shocked religious sensibilities in the communities where they lived. By acting scandalously, Cynics made their philosophy look scandalous as well. Their practice of philosophy faced the political risk of public ridicule and censure, which undermined the polity. Such anti-social impieties were for the most part morally unacceptable to ancient philosophic systems. So Socrates took poison rather than betray society, the Stoics turned conservative, the Epicureans kept to closed communities, and Seneca publicly worshipped what he privately despised. In the face of hypocrisy or the risk of ostracism, philosophers could, of course, avoid the practice of religion altogether, withdrawing from public ceremonies tainted with vulgarity and superstition. Such a strategy would be self-defeating. Philosophers could avoid vulgarity or sedition only at the price of making their philosophies ineffectual, by refusing to practice what their metaphysics preached. Philosophy as a way of life could not survive the Scylla and Charybdis of hypocrisy or honesty. Once philosophers tried to give expression to their religious views, they lost to scandal or vulgarity. The only way philosophy might retain its dignity would be not to act on its convictions. Yet to refuse to do so would reveal philosophy to be a fraud. Perusing the course of the preceding centuries, Augustine found philosophy peculiarly wanting in spiritual direction. Many philosophers, like Plutarch, obsessively observed bizarre religious rituals out of sincere devotion. Philosophy should have saved them from superstitions. Other philosophers, like Seneca, acted in bad faith, revealing an arrogance toward the humanity-aspiring sages called fools, not to mention exhibiting the craven cowardice of going along to get along. As the preeminent virtue theorists, the Stoics especially ought to have been less hypocritical. Those few philosophers who actually practiced what they preached – the Cynics and Epicureans, for example – engaged in shocking practices or invoked divinities that were appalling to the populace. Retrospectively, history sided with the people against the artifactual religions ordained by ancient philosophers. Their idiosyncratic theologies and studied perversities lacked heart and humanity. From the perspective of Revelation, philosophers who practiced superstitions, worshipped with hypocrisy or invented imaginary deities were dead souls, even while they had been living. Their devotion to philosophy betrayed them. In place of faith in specific divinities, civic conservatism pragmatically dictated public pieties from philosophers as well as all citizens. Ritualized religion served to keep the community together. Such was the conviction of Augustine’s first philosophic mentor, Cicero, whose Republic figures prominently in Augustine’s City. Cicero wrote

52 D. Glidden extensively on religious matters, with a special interest in divination (De Divinatione) and religious laws (De Legibus). He proudly held religious offices, notwithstanding occasional expressions of skepticism. Religion, philosophy, civic duty provided for a unified way of life with philosophic commitment at its center, as a unifying source of religious motivation, moral conduct, political direction. Cicero exemplified this stance in his writings and in life. Augustine attempted to vanquish this triumvirate of the philosophic lifestyle by a threefold strategy. Philosophy as a living ethic turned out to be a Babylon of confusion. Philosophy as the practice of religious piety proved hypocritical. Finally, Augustine would now argue that philosophy as the foundation for civic commitment was groundless. This was Augustine’s most devastating criticism yet, since it went to the core of what ancient philosophy had been most valued for. If there could be no true community on earth, philosophy as a way of life had been pointless from its first beginnings as the cement of civic humanism, the conceptual bond that held society together. And whatever approximate communities in fact existed, philosophy did not really contribute to their sustenance, Augustine argued. To make the case, Augustine levelled his most fundamental criticism at Cicero, the Roman philosopher he most admired.

The Death of Civic Humanism Plato’s Republic, Cicero’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God constituted a continuum extending from the fourth Century B.C.E. to the fifth Century C.F. of our common era. Just as Cicero conceived his work as a reply to Plato, so Augustine explicitly responded to Cicero as well as Plato. Cicero began his work with a definition of community designed to replace Plato’s blueprint conception of society in terms of collective self-sufficiency. Augustine focused, in turn, on Cicero’s conception, only to abandon it dramatically at the denouement of his City of God. Cicero’s definition seized on the difference between a true community and a mere collection of persons brought together willy-nilly: Community (res publica) is the business of the people (res populi). Yet, the people are not an assembly (coetus) of human beings brought together (congregatus) in any sort of way. Instead, they constitute an assembled multitude brought together into partnership (sociatus) out of unanimity for what is right (iuris consensu) and from a common good (utilitatis communione).48

While this definition is of special interest to Hellenistic scholarship, our interest here concerns the use Augustine made of it.49 Cicero suggested that organized society is dependent on the people as a whole. It cannot be constituted merely as a collection of individual, circumstantial interests.50 What is first required for community is partnership, or a society bound together out of consensus regarding what is right, where persons come together as a body by agreeing in this way to a rule of law befitting such a partnership. Cicero’s second requirement is this: the common good must be pursued as a real benefit held in common by a community so constituted. Cicero’s definition is not conspicuously utopian. Unlike Cynics or those Stoics who argued that a true polity could only consist of moral sages, Cicero laid down no such requirement that all the persons gathered into a community be wise or good, nor had Plato required this in his Republic. Nor did Cicero’s characterization of consensus here

Requiem for Philosophy 53 require the existence of some single natural law that would be universally recognized by any community of people anywhere they gathered in the world.51 Localized consensus regarding what was right would apparently suffice, wherever sufficient numbers of persons gathered to constitute a society. Similarly, the existence of a shared advantage gave local substance to their situation, in the way in which, say, water became a common good for desert-dwelling Californians. Cicero added, following this definition, that community is not born of weakness but rather aricus from the gregarious need of humanity to live and work together. Consequently, a man would have to be a monster, not even really human, to spurn human society entirely, rejecting any communal sense of justice whatsoever.52 Humans are not by nature loners. They inevitably form associations, create a populus and constitute communities. Community is continuously percolated out of circumstance and history. Cicero proceeded to demonstrate the explanatory power of this conception by recalling Roman history. Cicero described the founding and the growth of Rome as a dynamic effort through the ages to articulate a social partnership that would provide for the Roman people a shared advantage and a common sense of what is right, in harmony with the disparate interests of the population. This goal, Cicero insisted (here following Plato), could not be achieved without a supreme sense of justice governing the people as a whole.53 Yet, the shared sense of justice Cicero had in mind was not detailed enough to quibble over; everyone in Rome knew right from wrong, whether upstanding citizens or lowly criminals. Augustine’s first retort to Cicero’s conception of community was quick and to the point: there had never been a community in ancient Rome because there never had been justice.54 Augustine then followed this initial contravention with a competing Roman history designed to highlight in detail all the injustices of Rome Cicero glossed over. By the time he had finished with his unexpurgated version of Roman history, in Book III of the City, Augustine thought he had convincingly demonstrated that there had not even been a common sense of right and wrong among the ancient Romans. There had been no Roman populus at all; instead, there had only been a mob.55 Reality had fallen far too short of the alleged consensus of the people to render that consensus credible. Part of Cicero’s ensuing argument in his Republic addressed the importance of a philosophically informed leadership, able to give voice to the consensus of the people and genuinely guide the common interest of the Romans. As Cicero’s interlocutors explored different sorts of leadership, ranging from a philosopher-king to mixed forms of republican government, it remained the case that philosophic wisdom should inform the state, ensuring justice in its constitution and legislation. Indeed, the practiced wisdom of experienced and philosophically trained politicians created a Ciceronian vision of republican community as an image of enlightenment. Human beings have a sufficient moral vision to recognize what is right, especially when educated and led by leaders who are practiced in their wisdom. Plato first suggested this, Cicero agreed. If this conception proved effective, the living practice of philosophy would prove central to community, giving shape to moral sentiments, discerning common good. At the same time, philosophers would demonstrate a living presence in their communities, deferring contemplative study for civic duty, the trials of leadership, the experience of daily, difficult decision making. As Plato was fond of saying in his own Republic, leaders serve the people the way a shepherd tends his flock, not for his own sake but theirs. The community is central, philosophers its savants and its servants.

54 D. Glidden Cicero made community central to his Republic and civic duty the true and only calling of philosophy. Without practically wise leaders who understood the foundations for right and wrong, because in their wisdom they understood what justice truly was, any consensus of the people would prove too fragile and unstable to survive haphazard education amidst sheer sophistry or demagoguery. Without philosophers in politics, humanity would fail to stay together as a people and sustain community. Such was Cicero’s contention. The polity was intrinsically dependent for its maintenance on practiced leaders with philosophic wisdom. But Augustine could not endorse this picture, once he had dismantled the Ciceronian commonwealth back into the miserable miscellany of its component persons, including women, slaves and other victims philosophers typically ignored.56 In Book XIX of the City, Augustine engaged in one final, sweeping assault on the philosophic humanism advanced by Cicero’s conception of community. It was not enough to demonstrate that on Cicero’s conception there had never been a Roman people. Augustine also wanted to reveal how Cicero’s very conception of community was flawed. Augustine did so by recalling the original recipe of Plato’s Republic, that justice is the master virtue which assigns to each his own, both in the state and within the soul.57 A communal sense of what is right presumes the presence of this prior sense of regulative justice in the psyche.58 As reason controls desire, so the soul controls the body. But reason requires insight to be right. So divine love and light are needed to bring direction and illumination to reason, enabling the mind to recognize reality and to avoid sectarianism or skepticism. Lacking illumination, reason cannot see properly; there can be no self-regulating justice in the psyche. The misguided soul cannot properly command the body, nor can reason justly control desires. With justice lacking in individual souls, justice cannot be created cumulatively by gathering such persons together.59 The result of this Platonic argument of Augustine’s was to render civic humanism implausibly utopian, as assorted early Stoics had themselves maintained from the beginning, denying the reality of community on earth among persons of few virtues and misdirected reason. But the problem lay with inclination, not with reason. Before reason can control desire, before the soul can take charge of the body, what is needed first of all is the initial inclination to seek what the psyche should truly cherish, to identify its proper spiritual love, in order to give direction to the soul’s work, to enable the mind to recognize the beauty and goodness of reality. The prisoner first must leave the Cave. The mind must seek illumination. Only then will wisdom come. Only then can the soul do its thing, asserting hegemony over the body, with reason disciplining desire. In this way, love’s primal inclination to cherish what the soul deeply needs, to find what gives the soul meaning, takes precedence over instrumental reason and even over mental vision. Plato had called this inner yearning eros, but he wrongly took inclination toward beauty and goodness as a given. Unfortunately, love’s inclinations tergiversate; souls lose direction. It was not enough for reason to be careful, as the Stoics expected of their sages—to come up with correct conceptions and accurate definitions of justice, for example. For the Platonists and Augustine, one first had to see reality rightly, to visualize justice, before proceeding on to verbal definitions. Otherwise philosophy would yield its 288 sectarian variations. Argument would never take the place of mental vision. Justice was the soul’s work of regimenting, but in order to visualize the soul’s task, first one had to love the Light. So, Augustine argued mental vision was itself dependent on a prior, primal yearning.

Requiem for Philosophy 55 In this way spiritual salvation—the individual yearning for personal illumination— took precedence over community consensus, whose collective sense of right and wrong was itself dependent on prior, private inclinations, seeking what individual souls separately sought to place their faiths in. With that objection, the political future of philosophy clouded over, since, Augustine argued, philosophy could not create this primary spiritual inclination. It could only follow it and serve it. Consequently, Augustine offered a replacement definition of community which echoed his earlier insistence, eligite quem colatis: ‘A people is an assembled (coetus) rational multitude made into partnership (sociatus) by common fellowship (concordi communione) concerning what it is they love’.60 Human beings come together to constitute communities. But what converts a multitude into a people goes all the way back to something primal and spiritual: what such persons individually and collectively deeply love, not merely how they reason, not even what their minds envision. Applied philosophy proved groundless in the formation of community because it applied itself to individuals already in pursuit of prior inclinations, already gathered into various associations out of primal loves. Human beings do not organize their lives from a consensus created out of nothing, some fictional, original position purely formed by reason’s calculations and shared advantage. Instead, we begin with various culturally situated inclinations. Consequently, any communal sense of right and wrong derives from private yearnings, rather than an imposed vision or reasoned argumentation. And inclinations vary. Cicero’s philosophic humanism consequently proved naive, since it failed to perceive the fundamental differences among human yearnings, failing to appreciate the primacy and vagaries of love. At the same time, Augustine rejected the purist, Stoic stance that would discount any human gathering as a community unless it were a perfect one manifesting perfect love. It wasn’t really true, Augustine now admitted, that there had been no Roman people.61 Rather, there had been so many different peoples. There are all so many clubs and secular associations. Communities multiply themselves continuously into a plurality of associations, reflecting different primal drives and motivations. So ancient philosophers formed separate factions, operating from assorted inclinations: Stoics, Cynics, Epicureans. Perhaps what primarily motivated the Stoics was a yearning for self-discipline, a common impetus among obsessive depressives—Stoics from Chrysippus to Epictetus certainly had been driven by a melancholic yearning for staying in control in face of woeful fate. Perhaps the Cynics had been motivated by narcissistic rage against the existence of a paternal social order which would impose its will on them—something like this certainly might explain the thrill they took in flaunting conventions. Possibly, Epicureans had been driven by the kind of voluptuary delights so familiar among infantiles, the childlike voluntas Lucretius himself readily confessed to. Whatever the motivations, competing philosophic schools came into being out of differing primal yearnings which their philosophies only then responded to. For Augustine and the Christians, to be sure, the only community worth serving was the one inclined to God, rather than secular associations with their other, lesser loves. But the enlightenment that turned humanity toward the Heavenly City required giving shape and guidance to inchoate inner passion in order to give direction to the soul. This was not the work of sages but of saints, the quiet work of prayer and supplication instead of competitive argumentation or even philosophic vision. Inculcating faith to heal and then lead the soul to salvation was of far greater centrality to the City of God than it had been even for Platonism, which had exhibited little facility for motivating the poetics of the soul.

56 D. Glidden To Cicero, it seemed that res publica is a creation of consensus, a common vision, and where there is no vision, the people perish. Augustine objected that what creates a populus even moral vision but a motivating, spiritually-driven inclination to which vision and reason are in turn responsive: In this way, the soul’s primary work was spiritual: to harken to God’s love and guide voluntas, so that the soul could flourish and sustain itself within a fellowship of saints who share such saving inclinations, yielding a spiritual community, as a consequence of a common love.62 Philosophy had no more of a voice in keeping society or the soul together than any other common interest group or affiliation acting out a deeper motivation. The care of the soul and the salvation of humanity were beyond the ken of philosophic therapies, since philosophy could not inculcate primal love. Philosophy could not save souls because it had no shaping love at its disposal with which to guide and incline the psyche. Consequently, philosophy perished from a kind of heartlessness. With that fundamental objection, Augustine completed his case against philosophy as a way of life and buried ancient philosophy along with Rome.

Dead Souls and the Profession of Philosophy Western philosophy was victimized by Christianity. As Christianity consolidated its religious, moral and political authority, the profession of philosophy as a personal commitment to a living practice vanished into history. The preeminence of Stoicism or even Platonism faded; philosophies lost influence and identity. Christianity made the legacy of ancient texts her own. By being assimilated into Christianity, what remained of philosophy changed its character, from a living way of life to an archive of arguments, distinctions, vocabularies. So the learned Nemesius, who was Bishop of Emesa in Syria and a contemporary of Augustine, wrote a discerning treatise on human nature by mining Platonism for Christian insight. But the way already had been chosen by Jesus, the Church Fathers, and the Scriptures; the way of life, the way of faith, and the meaning of community were found and fixed forever. That perennial search for a final, philosophic answer to life’s great questions had enticed schools of philosophy for centuries. But searching presupposed solutions could finally be found that would put an end to such inquiry completely. Augustine’s City of God represented Catholicism as the answer. Pagan philosophical life-styles gradually died out. Among Christians, heretical viewpoints were vanquished with an enthusiastic vengeance appropriate for a systematic Weltanschauung that would brook no competition. As the centuries began to pass, it was no more conceivable that non-Judaeo-Christian philosophies of life could flourish in the West than civic independence could flourish under Lenin. The ancient philosophic commitment to a way of life required a genuine community to share it and sustain it—Stoa, Garden, Lyceum, Academy; a circle of friends, the polity, the cosmic village. And for at least the ensuing thousand years there was not place, space or sanctuary for the independent social practices of those few free-thinking philosophers who would act upon their thoughts: not in universities or monasteries, not in churches, kingdoms or town squares, and certainly not among the illiterate general population. The community at whatever level, from village square to a catholic universe, was already taken over, more or less, with the official love of God. All the answers had been found. It is also true to say that Catholicism succeeded in its conquest because philosophy had failed. Augustine’s criticisms proved discerning, devastating. The road to happiness had been continually obscured by ancient philosophy’s 288 divergent moral pathways, with each path taken acclaimed as the one and only. In its stead, Christianity defined

Requiem for Philosophy 57 happiness more concretely and displaced the self entirely from the center of reality. This made for a considerable improvement over the arrogance of ancient egos that had turned the search for wisdom into bitter rivalries. Christianity provided a clear-cut way of life to last into eternity. And the Church had every reason to assume the burden of authority after the dismal moral failure of the ancients who had never come to a consensus even after a millennium and who had never really practiced what they preached. Similarly, ancient philosophic pieties came up against a new religion whose powerful expression gave sufficient definition to a popular faith to efface false gods and idols, though of course ritualized remnants of paganism survived. But the philosophers who had worshipped foolishly were forever discredited because of their peculiar religious views, praying to the sun and moon. In retrospect, how could they be seen as sages? It became a laughing matter that Socrates sacrificed a cock to Ascelepius or Plutarch prayed at Delphi. Even Platonism suffered for its false devotions. By attempting to live their metaphysics, philosophers gave sufficient expression to their religious views to look like fools. Early Christianity seemed right to ridicule those whose false pieties undid them. It was not until the Renaissance when Dante Alighieri, for example, rehabilitated ancient reputations ever so slightly, once faith began to yield. Finally, philosophy as the civic bond of community came unglued once the very concept of the polity had been displaced by the spiritual reconstruction of community. The success of monasteries anticipated the Eternal City far better than any ancient political philosophy had done. The ancient wisdom that community was organized around a conceptual identity, a sense of justice if you will, lost its plausibility, once it no longer seemed compelling to insist that ideas governed society, instead of primal passions or love’s knowledge. Concepts followed inclinations, rather than the other way around. And so the love of God or King became the underlying basis for community, from which institutions of justice were to follow. Moreover, the actual history of ancient Greece and Rome discredited whatever claims philosophy had ever made for assuming civic authority. Civic philosophical pretensions proved spiritually barren, heartless, cruel systems. In sum, ancient philosophy lost to its Christian competitor, as a living ethic, as a living faith and as the ground of being for society. The story of philosophy is more complex a tale than this requiem for ancient sages would suggest. Philosophic research continued unabated. Only philosophy as a way of life had perished. Christianity afforded philosophers the opportunity to continue discretely with their work in theory, by abandoning the practice of their views entirely. Once freed from application, philosophy could flourish under such a dispensation. And this I take to be Augustine’s original sin against the practices of the ancient philosophers. Like the serpent tempting Eve in Eden, Augustine offered philosophy the apple of knowledge at the price of idleness. All philosophy had to do, to escape Augustine’s criticisms, was to abandon its commitment to a way of life and simply theorize, instead leaving practiced ethics, piety and social justice to the authority of the Church and the administration of those in charge. In this way, Augustine allowed philosophy to continue on as a dead discipline in the service of scholasticism. Philosophical professionalism emerged, liberated from the burden of its practice in antiquity. Professionalism constituted the mors secunda of philosophy. Christianity turned out to be convenient for those fragile souls whose philosophical dispositions would rather speculate than socialize, rather theorize than act on their convictions, who would prefer to turn their interest away from the embarrassments of public piety and the civic duties of the polity. In other words, by dying to daily life

58 D. Glidden philosophy became a way of life that afforded considerable relief to those seeking to withdraw through purely theoretical reasoning. It may not have been entirely Augustine’s fault and that of early Christianity that philosophy finally deferred its way of life, its faith, and its civic duty to organized religion and political administration. Philosophers themselves doubtlessly found it more convenient to live their philosophic lives more passively. Yet Augustine and the early Church sorely tempted them at the beginning of the Christian era to break with ancient philosophical lifestyles, to pursue merely theoretical research by withdrawing personal commitment for the views which they expressed. The emergence of philosophical professionalism marks a break between the ancient and the modern conceptions of philosophy, broadly conceived. As long as philosophy remained theoretical, it might address nearly any subject-matter, without incurring a corresponding obligation to implement theory into practices or endure the consequences and embarrassments of attempting to act upon a thesis. And so, once established, professional philosophy flourished from medieval days well into this century. Of course, there always were philosophers who occasionally attempted to implement their understandings of nature, morality and polity by spinning gold from straw, flaunting moral conventions, or becoming social revolutionaries. But they proved exceptions to the rule. And a few eccentrics, like Bruno, were even executed. Except for occasional figures like Montaigne and Pascal, deeper questions of spirituality remained outside the bailiwick of professional philosophical inquiry. Instead, formal logics thrived along with self-centered epistemologies, and hosts of technical vocabularies were invented to suit the logocentricity of authors. By becoming professional (without professing), philosophers in general were able to prosper in what became modern universities. Professionalism allowed philosophers to defer all final answers, to let their language games stay in play forever. One puzzle posed by this picture is the surviving status of the professional philosopher. From a contemporary viewpoint, the philosopher is typically an academic author, conceiving and writing answers to questions that have been asked forever— theorizing in philosophy is a never-ending process, like the thirst of Tantalus. Some professionals avow they believe in philosophical progress, but it proves difficult to point to any, except to say that new words invariably follow up on older ones. Once detached from life, philosophical contemplation turns into an artifactual construction, a fiction of re-invention, a never-ending story which might go on eternally as vocabularies invariably change and different focal points for story-lines and argumentative approaches are brought forward out of assorted social pressures and occasional empirical discoveries. Consequently, contemporary philosophy as an argumentative exercise has nothing else to answer to, except to other professionally trained, philosophical readers. In this way, compositions about metaphysics, morality, or society turn into merely compositions about other compositions, never really implemented into practices which might try their plausibility publicly. So, philosophy lives on as a professional Spiel, lacking a motivating spirituality that would dare to bring philosophy alive again, by professing philosophy as a way of life once more.

Fighting for the Soul of Philosophy Cynics, pessimists, indifference, those grown weary of commitment, all might welcome the professionalization of philosophy, in lieu of professing a philosophy personally. Such professionalism can serve in turn as a form of liberation from more personal attachments to civic, religious or private demands upon our lives. At the same time, those who first

Requiem for Philosophy 59 study philosophy as undergraduates or who begin graduate research typically envision philosophy as a way of life. Such is the naive attraction, the excitement, of asking life’s great questions, in the hopes that answers can actually be found. Most of philosophy’s initiates are not already pessimists. Indeed, they are enthusiasts. Usually, inspiration fades with increasing studies, as the connection between practice and profession weakens. In this way, what first motivates the study of philosophy is not sustained in making a profession of it. Consequently, the profession of philosophy lacks the resources to display its initial personal appeal, once one has become professional about it. Augustine argued that ancient philosophy had failed out of heartlessness. Philosophy had failed to address the inchoate spiritual yearning that drives all human beings one way or another. Philosophy did not know how to nurture souls or make them grow. From Augustine’s point of view, professionalism reflects a lack of soul. From the point of view of typically professional philosophers, there is no soul there to lose. Souls died, brains survived. The ghost in the machine departed long ago. Consequently, responding to Augustine might not prove of interest to contemporary professionals. But it might prove compelling to those initiates who have yet to lose their love of philosophy as they still seek a living path to some inner sense of calling and vocation. Theorizing will not suffice to engage philosophy in daily life. Asking even challenging questions about philosophy is another form of contemplative withdrawal. So theory and metaphilosophy by themselves will not enable students to respond to Augustine’s claim that philosophy proves heartless. Providing new and improving answers to the eternal questions proves idle, too. History should by now have discouraged those who would fashion further moral and political solutions. New blueprints are not as necessary as demonstration projects. Cynics and pessimists suggest that philosophy’s great questions were never really questions capable of answers, even when Socrates first posed them. And so they surrender to the dying of philosophy, as ancient skeptics did before them. Furthermore, many find that by making a game of philosophical inquiry they can reap considerable professional success, once they abandon any hope of practicing what they preach. The effect of such cynicism is to turn initiates in love with wisdom into hard-headed, cold-hearted professionals. So the student of philosophy has a real difficulty in sustaining a connection between the profession of philosophy and the nurture of her soul. Those who would answer Augustine must instead address the eros of the psyche, to seek what makes the soul grow. But this requires breaking with that guiding element in professional philosophy which works from top to bottom, beginning with generalizations, for instance, which apply to every human uniformly. From a spiritual point of view, every human is a host of different yearnings. To seek what makes a soul grow varies with each and every human being whose complex of motivations variously derive from assorted family histories, interests, surrounding cultures. Here the usual universal generalizations fail philosophy abruptly, because one size does not fit all, or even any one. Consequently, a philosophy concerned with providing souls with nourishment and even spiritual direction would have to start with individuals instead of universals. Instead of abstract claims on human nature or the nature of the polity, philosophers with interest in the eros of the soul would first have to examine their own life stories and the lives of those whom they would inspire. Personal narrative would take the place of universal claims. Insight would be gleaned from a potpourri of human stories. The novel, fable, essay or short story could well prove to be better philosophic vehicles than the professional article or treatise, and intimate personal conversation far more spiritually illuminating than formal argument.

60 D. Glidden To explore the depths of human motivation is deeply psychological and would require a philosopher to seek further understanding from other disciplines such as clinical psychology, sociology, literature, religion and history. The so-called autonomy of philosophical inquiry would cease. In its place would be the humility of recognition that what makes the soul grow requires artful insight, more than science. It requires experience with other humans and considerable self-knowledge, rather than the isolated life of reading and more writing. To provide philosophy with a heartfelt sensitivity to the variety of spiritual yearnings which guide souls in their formations requires exhibiting that sensitivity oneself. In other words, the answer to Augustine is to practice philosophy once more from the beginning, with a renewing personal commitment to the care of souls. It is, of course, one thing to gain some sense of the varietals of human motivation. It is quite another to search out those specific motivations which would nurture souls in their particular formation. If philosophy were to be a way of life again, it would also have to have some certain sense of what makes the soul good. But unlike the ancients, who claimed to know this generically, the effect of Augustine’s criticisms requires a more intimate and variable sense of human flourishing than simply saying, say, the life of reason is the good. It would require philosophers not to seek to make students in their own image or that of some uniformly ideal human being but rather to gain an almost clinical understanding of what makes different souls grow into healthy, decent persons, so as to encourage a variety of good persons, with assorted traits of character, interests and abilities. This patience with pluralism also would require embracing widely different polities and cultures, all the while retaining confidence that goodness could be sorted out from bad. And philosophers would be expected to practice this in their own lives and in their social relations. This task facing those who would renew philosophy as a spiritual way of life might appear too daunting. It might even hasten a retreat back to idle professionalism again, were it not for those few philosophers who already have attempted to revive philosophy in such a way as to meet Augustine’s criticisms. The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch is a case in point. In her view, ‘the spiritual pilgrimage (transformationrenewal-salvation) is the centre and essence of morality, upon whose success and well-being the health of other kinds of moral reaction and thinking are likely to depend’.63 In her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch explores the Platonic roots of what she takes to be the ‘pictorial nature of philosophy’,64 in response to what she sees as a human yearning for illuminating transcendence.65 This requires the inculcation of a deeper moral vision, sensitive to goodness and its varieties.66 Drawing on a combination of Neoplatonism, Buddhism, various nineteenth century philosophers and Wittgenstein, Murdoch sketches an inspiring portrait of what a philosophy would be like that proved responsive to the eros in the psyche. Murdoch would transform the nature of philosophy from a professional discipline fixated on abstraction to one far more interested in ordinary lives than theorizing. In doing so, Murdoch would remove the sense of Angst and tragedy that moral philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche invoke so readily. Philosophy is easier than it pretends to be. As Murdoch sees it, ‘the struggle against evil, the love of what is good, the inspired enjoyment of beauty, the discovery and perception of holiness, continues all the time in the privacy of human souls. This process is more like eating or breathing than like a dramatic conflict with clashing swords and contradictions’.67 Her novels bring this point out well, in the complexity of her

Requiem for Philosophy 61 characters, the indirection of their decisions, the muddledness of human beings. Like Augustine and St. Paul, Murdoch would have us look outward towards the world and one another for inspiration and direction, rather than dwelling as Cartesian solipsists within our isolated caves.68 To grow our souls, we need to reorient our vision, to be guided by a sense of the goodness percolated up from within our common daily lives, rather than seeking an transcendent a form of a goodness so abstract that it loses all connection with the most ordinary aspects of humanity: Good is also something clearly seen and indubitably discovered in our ordinary unmysterious experience of transcendence, the progressive illuminating and inspiring discovery of other, the positive experience of truth, which comes to us all the time in a weak form and comes to most of us sometimes in a strong form (in art or love or work or looking at nature) and which remains with us as a standard or vision, an orientation, a proof of what is possible and a vista of what might be . . . The ordinary way is the way.69

Although Murdoch describes this enterprise at times in terms of a hybrid Buddhist Christianity (one also thinks of Quakers), her focus is not denominational, or even particularly Christian. Instead, Murdoch seizes on the daily search for a spiritual goodness that is at the heart of what it is to be human and what it is to love God. In this way, her reflections comport nicely with a form of philosophy that can renew itself out of Augustine’s criticisms. Devotion lies at the heart of philosophy, if philosophy is to be practiced and lived. But this requires focusing the primal yearning of eros on goodness. For it is in goodness that our salvation lies as well as that of philosophy itself. So Murdoch, like Augustine, begins with Plato: I have taken here the image (concept) of Eros from Plato. ‘Eros’ is the continuous operation of spiritual energy, desire, intellect, love, as it moves among and responds to particular objects of attention, the force of magnetism and attraction which joins us to the world, making it a better or worse world: good and bad desires with good and bad objects. It gives sense to the idea of living good, something absolute and unique, a magnetic focus, made evident in our experience through innumerable movements of cognition. Good represents the reality of which God is the dream. It purifies the desire which seeks it. This is not just a picturesque metaphysical notion’.70

In this way, Murdoch would return philosophy to practice once again. But she would do so by reconstructing the motivating yearning to philosophize as a religious, spiritual yearning to be good and live a life accordingly. In his requiem for philosophy Augustine argued that philosophy lacked humility. It also lacked the courage to shape and fashion the eros of the soul. For Augustine, the grace of God gave strength to human beings to efface their pride and reverse this cowardice. For secular philosophers living in a world where God’s presence is at best attenuated, the temptation to succumb to professionalism in the face of these all too human failings cannot be surprising. But to acquiesce is to live a second death.

Notes 1 It is not my purpose to situate this essay in the context of ancient or contemporary scholarship, although I have taken care to make my exposition accurate. Consequently, in these notes I shall

62 D. Glidden

2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

only cite a few works which I find might be of particular interest to the reader. On the ancient and modern status of philosophy see respectively: Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. and intro. by Arnold I. Davidson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995) and Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, New York, Basic Books 1987. Cf. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers vol. 1, Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press 1991. Cf. Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing Too, Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press 1994, esp. pp. 257–72, 281–307. Cf. Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press 1982; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. 1989, pp. 127–42. Cf. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press 1993. Adam and Eve are created both together at Genesis 1.27 but Adam is created first and foremost at 2.21–23. Augustine takes this latter passage as canonical. Augustine, De Civitate Dei Book XII, chapters 22, 28=CD xii 22 and 28. It is my intention in these notes to keep citations to Augustine to a bare minimum, except for citing representative passages the reader can then turn to. It is, of course, Augustine’s own insistent language of a privileged gender I am quoting, singling out ‘man’ as the representative human being. CD xiii 10, cf. xiii 4–10. CD xiii 2–3; xix 28. CD xii 4; xxi 2, 4. Cf. CD xxi. Compare Heraclitus: ‘Although reason is common, the many live as though they had a private understanding’. (Frg. 2) I cite this passage to point out that nearly every sentence in Augustine’s voluminous writings has its parallels in ancient philosophy. Even his complaints about philosophy are commonplace. This is only to be expected, given Augustine’s erudition and the thousand years of philosophy which preceded him. In this essay, it is Augustine’s reading of the ancients I am attempting to describe, not his accuracy as a scholar. Nor will I attempt to cite the dozens of extant ancient passages paralleling or substantiating each of Augustine’s specific claims about philosophers. CD viii 5, cf. viii 1–13. It is worth remembering that the Plato Augustine knew primarily took the form of Latin translations of selected dialogues, together with Latin versions of neo-platonic commentators and Latin doxographers. Of the latter, works by Ambrose, Apuleius, Cicero, and Varro were especially influential on Augustine’s City of God. CD viii 6. Cf. for example ps.-Plato’s Seventh Letter at 341c–d. On the difficulties of reading Plato and Augustine’s way of reading him see CD viii 4. Augustine’s complex views of divine illumination evolved throughout his writings from first efforts in the De Magistro and subsequently in his Confessions to more mature formulations in the City of God, where Augustine drew upon specific connections with Plotinus, as at CD x 2. Interested readers might consult: (1) R. H. Nash, The Light of Mind: St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge, Lexington, Kentucky, Univ. of Kentucky Press 1969; (2) Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press 1987. Cf. especially CD viii 8, x 2. Cf. especially CD viii 7. Cf. CD viii 10. Cf. CD xxii 29. Cf. for example CD xiii 16–19, as well as Augustine’s first efforts to address skepticism in Against the Academicians. Cf. for example, CD ii 1, 7; iv 15. Cf. Seneca, for example, at De Constantia Sapientis x 3; Ep. 115.6 and 120.20. Cf. G. E. L. Owen, ‘Philosophical Invective’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1 1983, pp. 1–25. Cf. Plutarch’s Platonist essay, On Listening, 37c–48d, available in a recent translation of his Essays, New York, Penguin 1992, pp. 27–50. CD xviii 51. Cf. CD xvi 4; xviii 41. Cf. CD xix 1–3.

Requiem for Philosophy 63 29 CD xix 3; cf. xix 4–7. 30 One must remember that the Stoicism Augustine had in mind was primarily what Latin authors had described or subscribed to. In the CD, textual references to Cicero and Seneca are central, rather than originating doctrines of Zeno or Chrysippus. 31 For an exacting discussion, see ‘The Cosmic City’, in Malcolm Schofield’s The Stoic Idea of the City, Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press 1991, pp. 57–92. 32 Cf. CD viii 7; xiv 2. 33 CD xix 4. 34 Cf. CD i 17–27. 35 CD xix 4. 36 Cf. CD iii - vii, esp. iv 11–13. 37 Cf. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Univ. Press 1985, pp. 216–75, 296–337. 38 Varro’s Antiquities comprised 41 books, with 16 books describing ancient religious practices: cf. CD vi 3–6; also P. A. Brunt, ‘Philosophy and Religion in the Late Republic’, in Miriam Griffin and Jonathan Barnes (eds), Philosophia Togata, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1989, pp. 174–98. 39 Cf. CD v 20; i 23–7. 40 Cf. CD xix 4; cf. also Philodemus’ critical On Piety. 41 Cf. CD vi 8. 42 Cf. Schofield, op. cit., pp. 1–21; also Plutarch’s criticism of Stoic piety at Stoic. Repugn. 1034B. 43 CD preface to Book vii. 44 CD vi 10; also Seneca Nat. vii 30.1. 45 CD vi 10, adapted from the W. M. Green translation. For parallel charges against Cicero, see CD ii 27. 46 CD vi 11. 47 CD i 32. 48 DRP i 25.39; cf. iii 33.45, vi 13.13. The provenance of this definition is not of importance for our purposes here, though it is a matter of considerable contention. See the bibliography and commentary of James E. G. Zetzel in his recent edition of this text: Cicero, De Re Publica Selections, Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press 1995, pp. 127–30 49 Augustine paraphrases this definition, quoting the last line exactly at CD ii 21: ‘Populum autem non omnem coetum multitudinis, sed coetum iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatum esse determinat’. 50 In this way, Gesellschaft is dependent on Gemeinschaft: cf. Christopher Lasch’s use of this distinction, first revived in modern times in 1887 by the German sociologist Tönnies: The True and Only Heaven Progress and Its Critics, New York, Norton 1991, pp. 139–43. 51 Cf. DRP iii 32.33 where another figure in the dialogue, Laelius, invokes a Stoic definition of natural, or true, law in terms of ‘right reason in harmony with nature, diffused in all peoples, unchanging, everlasting’. 52 DRP i 25.39 and ii 26.48 with the contrasting case of Augustine’s ‘wild man’ at CD xix 12; cf. also DRP iii 33.45. 53 Cf. DRP ii 43.69 with 44.70: ‘. . .sine summa iustitia rem publicam geri nullo modo posse’. Cf. also DRP iii 32.33, 33.45. 54 CD ii 21: ‘. . .numquam illam fuisse rem publicam, quia numquam in ea fuerit vera iustitia’. 55 Cf. CD ii 21, later qualified at CD xix 24. 56 Cf. CD xix 21: ‘. . .et si non populus, nec res populi, sed qualiscumque multitudinis, quae populi nomine digna non est’. 57 CD xix 21: ‘Iustitia porro ea virtus est quae sua cuique distribuit’. 58 CD xix 21. 59 Ibid. 60 CD xix 24. 61 Ibid. 62 CD xix 18, 21, 23. 63 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, New York, Penguin 1992, p. 367. 64 Ibid., p. 36. 65 Ibid., p. 56. 66 Cf. Ibid., pp. 378, 399–400, 426–7, 430. 67 Ibid., p. 458.

64 D. Glidden 68 Ibid., p. 460: ‘St. Paul said we find God everywhere in the world, seeing in material things the spiritual reality which is beyond them. For the spiritual and the holy we are to look toward all the world, not toward our isolated self-will’. 69 Ibid., pp. 508–9. Cf. p. 430: ‘We find out in the most minute details of our lives that the good is the real. Philosophy too can attend to such details, using as examples or ‘‘evidence’’ experiences which are frequently, and of course emotionally, portrayed in literature’. 70 Ibid., p. 496; cf. pp. 408, 419, 428, 460, 503.

DAVID GLIDDEN is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His scholarly interests have focused on Hellenistic philosophy and the history of Platonism. He is also the author of numerous essays on contemporary moral issues, a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the California Council for the Humanities. University of California, Riverside, Riverside CA 92521, U.S.A.